The Soul Crossing
by KitMay
Summary: If we were alive today, we would never have met' When the Order learn of Voldemort’s latest plan, they embark on a mission to destroy the Veil for good. But when the mission goes wrong and Hermione is pulled in, who can she turn to? Regulus Hermione
1. Prologue : The Order Meets

**Disclaimer: No money made, no disrespect intended. Thanks.**

**Author's note:**

This story is a little different to things I have done before, but you don't often see Hermione/Regulus, yet it is one of my favourite ships.

So, as a tribute to my beloved Regulus, please join me on a trip to the Soul Crossing...

This story is rated M for some violence, sex and language, so please don't read it if you don't like those things.

**Summary: **

******"If we were alive today, we would never have met." **

When the Order Of The Phoenix learn of Voldemort's latest plan to use the Veil to experiment with immortality, they embark on a mission to destroy it once and for all. Hermione Granger is nineteen, and in charge of finding the spell that will succeed in this task. But when the mission goes wrong and Hermione is pulled in, who can she possibly turn to for help, now she's….well..dead?

* * *

**The Soul Crossing**

"_See you in your next life, when we'll fly away for good  
Stars in our own car we can drive away from here  
far away, so far away…"_

**Prologue**

**The Order Meets**

When the office door finally slammed shut after a long day, Hermione Granger usually felt both relieved and gratified with the usual sense of overachievement that comes from being a world class workaholic. Today, a Monday and the second one since her nineteenth birthday ,was no exception.

She snapped shut the desk diary that had just informed her of the meeting that night at Headquarters, and hurried up the stairs of the Central Wizarding Library.

Hermione hated being late. To her, tardiness was unprofessional at best and at worst, downright rude. She had only really opened the door of her London flat to deposit items in her study in the usual pile of organised chaos, give her long brown hair a quick brush, and change her clothes from stuffy work attire to her favourite jeans. Her wand already carefully concealed inside her sleeve, she checked the clock and with ten minutes to spare, apparated to number twelve, Grimmauld Place, home to Harry and now Ron, and of course, the Headquarters of the Order Of The Phoenix.

She rematerialised in the hallway, where the horrid troll's leg umbrella stand had still not been thrown out, much like the family tree Sirius had hated, and the numerous family portraits that were still being discovered all around the house at varying intervals. She glanced gingerly around for Kreacher, the house elf, expecting to hear him croaking out an insult any moment, but fortunately, for now, the coast was clear.

Whe she walked into the basement kitchen, dead on eight, the other members were already around the table. Without Snape's reports, they had suffered a loss, but as Lupin always said (though sometimes Hermione suspected that he varnished the truth a little) they had other spies, and they would have to do as well, even though everyone knew that this was impossible without being in the inner circle.

Harry, who was sitting nearest the door, looked at his watch as she walked in.

"Could you be any more accurate, 'Mione?"

She rolled her eyes, but grinned at him. She hadn't seen a lot of Harry and Ron lately, with all the work she had since the CWL had taken her on as Apprentice Librarian. She knew they only took on four people every five years, so she knew how lucky she was, and intended to make the most of it.

Remus began to addess the meeting in his usual mild tones. Hermione listened as attentively as she always listened, frowning at Ron sitting next to her as he began to fidget, tapping his foot incessantly against the table leg until Hermione prodded him underneath it. He jumped and gave her an irritated roll of his eyes.

Thanks to Ron distractiing her, she rejoined the discussion half way through Harry speaking about the new evidence that had come to light about Voldemort's latest experiments.

"He heard about what happened to Sirius," Harry was saying, in a low but carrying voice. " And from what we can tell, he's been mulling it over for a while, realising what it might mean. That is to say, what the veil in that chamber might mean."

Seamus Finnigan put down his glass and interrupted:

"Why should we worry about that, though? Surely it'll kill them too, if they get too close…?"

"Not if they have the right spell to stop its effect." Lupin said. "The veil is a complex thing, not even the Ministry really know much about it. But as Harry was saying…"

"As I was saying," Harry said at exactly the same moment, sending a light ripple of laughter around the room, "Our information is that they want to use it to experiment with immortality. Voldemort want to find other ways of keeping himself alive, just in case somebody ever did find a way to kill him - (here, he glanced nervously at Hermione and Ron, the only ones of the assembled company who knew that they had already found and destroyed four of Voldemort's six Horcruxes, leaving, if Dumbledore's assessment was correct, only Nagini and Voldemort themselves, and the locket that had once belonged to Voldemort's mother, the locket of Salazar Slytherin himself.)

"In short, what we are going to do is get there first."

There was a loud murmur all around the room. Hermione frowned.

"Harry, when you say we are going to get to the Veil before the Death Eaters do, what exactly do you mean?" she asked, to another murmur of agreement.

Harry set his jaw. Hermione knew the expression, her friends determination was one of the things she had always admired about him, as much as he had admired her intelligence. When he spoke, that determination carried over into his voice, leaving nobody in the room in any doubt that he would have this done or die in the attempt, as he almost had so many times.

"We're going to go to the Ministry just like we did the night that-" ( Harry called Bellatrix Lestrange a name that made even Ron colour) "murdered Sirius. And we're going to destroy the veil so Voldemort will never get his filthy hands on it."

-

The mission was decided for that Friday night. She would have liked to have had more time to study, but time was of the essence, the Death Eaters could strike at any time.

Hermione had been entrusted with the researching a spell that would work. With her access all hours to the biggest Wizarding library in the United Kingdom, she had stayed up late most nights searching through the dusty tomes in the hope of creating some such spell that would close off the Veil for good, and destroy both it's physical form and it's powers entirely. Many of the nights Ron had sat with her, but he hadn't been much help, and eventually she told him to go and help Harry with the rest of the Order. He'd reluctantly agreed, and she had been able to continue with her work in peace.

Success had come in the early hours of the Thursday morning, the very day before the mission was to take place. It came as no surprise to Hermione that her name was high up on the list of participants in tomorrow night's raid on the Ministry, and in any case, there would be no time for anyone else to learn the complex combination of charms that the spell she intended to use on the Veil required to be effective.

The spell was a difficult combination of a reverse vacuum to seal off the gate the veil created, a banishing charm, and an alteration of the Reductor curse. Obviously, as she could not possibly put it to the test, she could only work on the basis of theory, but when she called Harry on the Floo to explain what she'd done, he seemed excited, and never questioned whether or not it would work.

It was true that Hermione was seldom incorrect in her judgement, and perhaps the confidence of her friends had managed, for once, to rub off on her, for when they converged in the drawing room of Grimmauld Place, under the horrid Doxy-gnawed tapestry embroidered with the names of Blacks past, she too felt as if it was going to be another one of her successful attempts in her work for the Order. There was no denying, either, that she was a useful person to have around in any problematic situation, and this, coupled with the mature looks of the trim woman she had become, garnered her plenty of favourable attention. Hermione smoothed the long, dark velvet dress she had worn (velvet, she reasoned, was one of the things least likely to be seen in the dark) and reached out for the cloak that all members of the Order wore on missions to identify each other, especially if curses began to fly, like they memorably had that night they had gone to the Ministry in their fifth year.

But they were adults now. There were ten of them, all covering their heads with the hooded cloaks in a darkest red, with a gold Phoenix embroidered on the left sleeve when they apparated outside the Ministry.

Hermione looked across the dark sky. It was a warm, clear night, and in any other circumstances she wouldn't have worn the cloak. Somewhere, a clock struck the hour. Eleven-thirty. It was time.

"Let's do it," Harry whispered.

-

The Ministry atrium lay silent and deserted. Wands out, the small company advanced down the long room. The elevators had stopped, so they headed for the stairs, Harry and Lupin at the fore, with her and Ron just behind them, and the other six crowding down after them. Their feet seemed impossibly loud on the cold stone steps, and Hermione cast a silencing charm to mute the noise, but she couldn't shake an odd feeling of dread rising in her chest. She glanced across at Ron, who looked nervous as he always did on this sort of occasion, but he didn't look unduly disturbed, and Harry and Lupin were quickening their pace, and now they were in the vast, long corridor she remembered from three years ago.

The plain black door to the department of Mysteries lay before them. Harry jabbed his wand at it, and it opened silently, letting them pass. Soon she was looking at the circular walls of the room with the revolving doors.

Hermione saw herself again, in that moment, only a few weeks short of her seventeenth birthday, with Ron, Luna, Harry, Ginny, and Neville, of all people, standing in this room sure that they were about to discover Sirius Black being tortured into madness by Lord Voldemort. She was jerked from the unpleasantly vivid recollection, however, by Harry, pulling at her cloak and saying:

"Hermione, what was that spell again? The one to mark the doors?"

"Oh," she said, quite as vaguely as Luna Lovegood in that one moment of thoughtfulness, but before she could reply, Harry had pulled open the first door.

It was not the Death chamber. At Harry's inquiring look, Hermione stepped forward past Lupin and Ron, and said firmly

"Flagrate!" The familiar fiery cross was drawn on that door, and the next one, which seemed to be a broom cupboard, but when they tried the third door, the deathly silence came oozing out at them like something tangible.

There it was. The Death Veil where, Harry had told Hermione years ago, Sirius had succumbed to his evil cousin Bellatrix. She'd been unconscious at the time, having fought against one of the most brutal Death Eaters, Antonin Dolohov.

"This is it," Lupin said in a low voice, as they crept into the room one after the other.

Harry was once again wearing that expression Hermione knew a little better than she'd like; a look of aggressive determination.

"Ready, Hermione?" he whispered.

Hermione took a deep breath, trying to stay calm as she mentally recited the ritual to herself as she walked purposefully down the steps to the stone dais, Harry at her side.

"Ready," she nodded, drawing her wand.

-

"How long do we have?" Hermione whispered to Ron, who was standing on her other side, looking more than a little worried.

"Don't know," he muttered awkwardly. "How long d'you need?"

"About twenty minutes, ideally." she whispered back. As soon as possible, she thought fervently. An uncomfortable sensation of dread writhed in the pit of her stomach. She wanted to be away from this awful Veil as soon as possible. She had never seen Sirius go through it, but she had always thought it was dangerous, from the very first time she'd seen it, and tried to drag Harry away.

Harry himself, at that moment, was marshalling the others to form a guard facing the doors. Hermione prepared herself to cast, mentally reciting the spell she had created over and over, under her breath. The rest of them, Harry included, formed a line, all their backs to her, wands out. Just in case, they said.

Ron lingered by Hermione's side chewing on one side of his bottom lip, and resing his hand lightly on her shoulder as if he sensed her disquiet at the place.

"You, too, Ron," Harry said, rather pointedly, gesturing him to join the others, but Ron shook his head.

"I'll just stand here, alright?" he muttered, trying to sound casual. "Just in case 'Mione needs any help."

Harry paused a moment as if he was going to insist. "Ok," he said eventually. "We're ready, Hermione. You?"

"I'm ready," she said, loudly and clearly, like an affirmation to convince the world at large herself included. Ron tightened his grip a little. Hermione took one step forward, facing the Veil, raised her wand and began to cast.

-

Word-perfect, as always, Hermione's voice grew in confidence as she recited the spell, and as she looked at the old brick of the archway, she noticed it had begun to shimmer surreally. Another two minutes and the mortar between the ancient bricks seemed to liquefy and began to drip onto the stone floor like treacle.

_It__'__s really going to work! _Hermione thought, beginning the last part of the long incantation necessary to counter such an ancient magical gate. She held her wand aloft, higher and higher in readiness for the last few lines to finish off the spell.

She hadn't expected the pistol-shot crack that came from the doors, and the shouts from the Order members as someone or someones came charging down the stone steps into the room. She was aware of Ron shouting vaguely, frantically, through the sudden cacophony .

"_Hermione__…__finish it. It__'__s the Death Eaters!__"_

As if she'd been forced by an invisible hand, Hermione turned to see four figures in black hurtling down the stairs towards the dais. Blood pounding in her ears, she finished the incantation far quicker than she should have done, her wand arm shaking badly as she tried to concentrate.

_At least there__'__s only four of them__…_

A brick, then another, then another. Then a few, in quick succession. Hermione stared at the Veil, transfixed. She wanted to turn, join the battle behind her, run far away from this stone dais and never see the place again, but somehow she couldn't stop looking at it and then there were _voices. _

The voices were quite different to the yells and shrieks and swear words flying around the room behind her, as the Order battled the Death Eater guard. They were sibiliant, persuasive. They wanted her to come closer to them and although Ron's fingers were still on her shoulder, she couldn't help but do as they wanted…and then she felt the wind begin to blow around her, tearing at her hair and ripping at her clothes. She heard Ron give a shriek, and there was a loud bang somewhere behind her. Ron's fingers left her arm and the wind caught her and pulled, and she was only inches away from the swaying black cloth………and she could see flashes of green and white and mist and……

"Hermione! NO!" She heard Harry's voice as if it came from far away. Her cloak, caught by the raging winds, was ripped viciously from around her neck. Then, fingers gripped her wrist, Ron's, they must be, hot and clammy……..but it was no use. In slow motion, Hermione felt the irresistible pull of the charm she had meant to use to seal the gate, the pull of the Death Veil in front of her. The whispers filled her ears, getting louder and louder. She felt something light and feathery touch her cheek. Muzzily, she wrenched herself away from Ron's grip to brush it aside….

She was falling. Falling down into a fathomless black hole with white light blinding her eyes and Ron's screams of horror stinging her ears, calling her helplessly, over and over and over as she fell down and down into nothing

Then, there was only darkness.

* * *

Next...long walks, soul-eating evil spirits and Sirius' little brother. Comments welcome. 

lyrics by Brett Anderson from Suede's 'The Next Life'.


	2. One: Beyond The Veil?

**Disclaimer: No money made, no disrespect intended. Thanks.**

**Author's note:**

**Gratitude to my reviewers: MizzMoonyLuver - Forgive me, as I personally would go out to fight the forces of evil in chiffon and heels; as we saw in the Order of The Phoenix , you never know when Voldemort will show up! ; ) Seamus joined the Order, yes. In my version, at least. His Dad's a Muggle, and the Death Eaters don't like that.**

**Nynaeve80 - Thank you very much! and Angelic Bladez - thank you! Much appreciated!**

**Summary: **

******"If we were alive today, we would never have met." **

When the Order Of The Phoenix learn of Voldemort's latest plan to use the Veil to experiment with immortality, they embark on a mission to destroy it once and for all. Hermione Granger is nineteen, and in charge of finding the spell that will succeed in this task. But when the mission goes wrong and Hermione is pulled in, who can she possibly turn to for help, now she's….well..dead?

**One**

**Beyond The Veil?**

"_**Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It's the transition that's troublesome."**_

The Soul Realm lies in between the worlds of the living and the dead. Some never go there; they are the ones who have made their peace with their lives in the world they have left behind.

Some never leave, and there is not always a choice in this strange place, for it is largely what you make it. Sometimes, if they are lucky, the few that are brave enough to travel through this strange realm can find a message, a pointer left by those who have gone before in case another soul one day should pass the same way. For there is no mortality here, only the strengths - and the weaknesses - of one's soul shine through and show who you truly are. Death hold no fear for those who travel here, but as a very wise wizard once said...there are many things worse than death…

-

When Hermione came to, all the voices and the shouting and the rushing noise of blood in her ears had gone. She felt the damp under her cheek from something that felt like grass, and without opening her eyes, she reached stiff wet fingers up and under, almost prising her cheek away from whatever it was she was lying on.

Somewhere, in some kind of logical space, Hermione expected to see the stiff silent white of a hospital room, and in this way she could explain the still air, and the soundlessness, and the aching in her head. She was not at all prepared for what she did find, when at last reality dawned - dragging her up from some kind of hazy inbetween dream - and showed her at last that this was not St. Mungos, nor home, nor any place she knew. She lay on her side, in what used to be called the recovery position when she took those first aid lessons in Girl Guides. Her left cheek seemed to have almost fused with the grass, which had left the marks on her face.

The first silly thing that came to mind, was that the place did not seem to make any sound at all. But far from being peaceful, Hermione found this disturbing; the scrabbling of animals and the sound of snatches of birdsong and flowing water in the countryside a reassuring thing. As such, there was no reassurance about this strange place, and she didn't want to even begin to question how she actually got here in the first place.

This was the countryside, but if all she could remember was the _Order and the mission and the Death Eaters and Harry and Ron, and the shouting and the Death Eaters and the Ministry and the shooting of spells and the falling and the veil_……and the veil coming so close as she fell…..and the feel of the brush of the ghost of black fabric on pale skin and…

Hermione forced herself to stop thinking.

"_Get a grip on yourself, my girl,__"_ she told herself firmly, digging the nail of her index finger into her palm as if to reassure herself that she was still feeling and this really _wasn__'__t_ a dream.

It must be some sort of temporal teleport activated from all the spells being fired at once, and no matter how tenuous her rational mind wanted to tell her this explanation was, she couldn't really _believe_ she had fallen through..right through the veil, because then she'd be _dead_….and she couldn't be she? Not when she could - Hermione heaved herself carefully to a standing position - stand up and walk, and feel the ground underneath her feet, no matter how unsteady those feet felt at that particular moment.

Hermione felt woozy and lightheaded at she stood in the centre of the unfamiliar field. The sky was blue, she noticed, but not the reassuring summery blue of the lazy days she used to spend on the riverbanks of Oxford, the days that Harry and Ron would come to visit her and they would watch the Muggles go by in their boats. This sky was different, a low storm-colour, with no clouds or variation in tone at all, just an endless stretch of the same flat, menacing blue. She half expected to hear the rumble of low thunder but the place really felt like somebody had turned off the sound. The grass, too seemed a sick, yellowish green, and although it was coated with the sheen of what Hermione assumed to be dew, there was no morning freshness in the air. The whole place just seemed to exude wrongness.

She took a tentative step. She was still wearing the same dress she had put on earlier that night, but now the sleeve was ripped and the hem was torn. Perhaps she'd hit her head, and suffered some kind of concussion, and accidentally apparated herself away? She supposed that must be it, because her head ached terribly.

The best thing would be to get out of this field, and find someone with a telephone or an owl. That way she'd soon be able to get help.

Feeling slightly calmer, she began to walk towards the edges of the field. When she looked round, she noticed that one corner of the field she had been lying in looked strange blurred and dark.

_Probably a bog. Or a swamp? The last thing I need now._

In the opposite direction, she could see faint treetops beyond a rising bluish mountain range. Hermione had never liked heights, not at least since she'd been forced to ride on the back of a Hippogriff with Harry and Sirius Black, of all people. _They_ had thought it was something of a good laugh, but she couldn't bring herself to agree with them, somehow. She felt dizzy just looking at the mountains.

_Looks like Wales. Maybe it is. I wonder if Wales feels this depressing?_

The tops of the mountains, she noted, were not covered in snow, an icing sugar shower viewed from far off. They seemed to hang with a kind of dark grey fog, like the haze above traffic on one of those awful, hot, damp sticky days in London when the smog would hang above the traffic, and she would watch it unobserved from the windows of the Black's horrible old house. The house was a little like this place, she thought. Everything slightly off……..like a kind of sickness about it. Even the few trees and scrubby bushes she could see seemed to be losing their battle to live, twisting and pointing downwards like tortured bodies giving up the ghost. Hermione had no idea where she might be.

_Better find out, then._

The voice inside her head was talking louder now, pushing her on towards logical steps both inside and out.. Hermione's mind had always been constantly on the go, even as a little girl. But now it seemed to have stopped, relying on inherent codes of practice to find the solution to a problem.

It all should have been very straightforward, but even as Hermione began to walk slowly towards the field's edge, she could not shake off the feeling of dread in the bottom of her throat, the feeling that there was something about this place that was anything but straightforward, and that she was at some point soon, going to find out what it was.

-

Her first thought was to look for a path. Any path, she reasoned, for a path, by it's very nature, should surely lead somewhere, somewhere that she could be found. Somewhere with lines of communication. But now she'd been wandering across fields for what felt like over an hour (though she couldn't be sure) and there was really nothing here at all.

Sometime earlier on, she had felt in her dress, entertaining the vain hope that someone had been helpful enough to conveniently stash her wand in her pocket. But the one pocket was empty. She had vague recollections of her wand falling from her hand, but that was before she fell…

She noticed also that there were dark spots of dried blood all the way down the front of her clothing. They made darker, flat streaks on the material and dried hard. Hermione assumed that her nose must have bled, and raised her fingers up to her face to check, the cracking of dried blood around her nostrils flaking under her nail, confirming her suspicions. And her wand was nowhere be found.

She'd attempted, in desperation, to conjure her Patronus without the wand, but although pointing with a finger and incanting _"__Expecto Patronum!__"_produced the faintest of silver glows, Hermione knew in her heart it was hopeless.

Neither was there any discernable path, just endless fields and rocks and nothing that she could even say had been made by man or even creature, something to suggest that another living soul had passed this way before. It was untouched, blank, and although Hermione told herself firmly that she would not be afraid, she could not ignore the cold tendrils of fear that were just beginning to creep around the edges of her heart.

She walked on and on. Walking only because there didn't seem anything else to do.

Dark in this place did not seem to fall in the usual way, creeping over slowly from the west in minutes and hours. It began as a dark indistinct shape in the very centre of the sky, then seeping out over its entirety like a malignant ink blot upon the universe, colouring everything black. When Hermione realised what was happening, for the first time, she admitted to herself that she really was afraid. She did not even know if dark would even fall in this place, though she assumed it would at some point. She had no watch, and although her mother had bought her a mobile phone last Christmas, insisting that all the young people loved them these days, the pink gadget was still, to her knowledge, sitting on Ron's bedside table after he had discovered it and spent all afternoon fiddling with the games it featured until the battery ran flat. Ron didn't know how to recharge it, and even if he had, Hermione had never seen any electrical sockets in Grimmauld Place anyway. He had contented himself with removing the 'interchangeable fascia' that the box boasted, hadn't been able to reattach it, and then simply forgotten all about it.

Not knowing what else to do, she crouched down at the foot of the largest tree she could find, and with the fading daylight, searched around for some twigs in the hope of finding a way to build a small fire to keep away and wild animals that might be roaming in the night. She hadn't seen any animals, nor even any sign of them, but she supposed that one never could be sure. And she was cold without her cloak, the dress was fairly thick, enough under a cloak or coat for chilly London, but not enough to keep out the seeping cold of this place, wherever it was. Goosebumps prickled on her shoulders despite the fact that there was no wind. There was just a steady drop in temperature, almost Dementor-like. A fire would warm her, and she had no desire to sit in the dark until the morning came.

'_If it comes__…'_a nasty little voice whispered in her ear

Hermione would have liked to have been able to cast a simple "Incendio!" to send the flames spiralling up into heat and light and fearless colour. But without her wand, she had no choice but to find two sticks, rubbing them together in the hope of a spark until her wrists ached and her eyes blurred from watching them…back and forth…back and forth. But the twigs were damp…everything around her seemed to be damp, infused with cold and wet in a kind of despondent sadness, and the dark had fallen long before Hermione admitted to herself that it was useless. She huddled uncomfortably against the gnarled trunk of the stunted tree, and stared out into the blank darkness until she was convinced that her eyes were beginning to play tricks upon her and make the darkness move and shift in shapes and whispers. Her eyelids felt oddly heavy, and she felt them eventually close, her mind drifting away from her body and the cold with the blind hope against hope that when she woke up, this strange country, infused with the essence of hopelessness and despair, would be gone, and she'd be home again.

-

It was those same whispers that awakened her some time later, only now they were louder, and more distinct. Distinct enough for Hermione to be sure that she was not imagining the sound, nor what she saw as her eyes snapped open.

Her hair prickling with fright and the cold air numbing her arms, she saw the crawling black shapes advancing upon her through the darkness. Their shapes were hooded, vaguely humanoid, if one could imagine a human so utterly made of the sound and feel of darkness. They shifted around Hermione, distinct shape flowing to indistinct, forming a half circle around her as she crouched, frozen with fear, watching these unnamed creatures in some kind of terrible dance.

Their eyes seemed to glow amber-red in slits around black, empty sockets as they advanced, their whispers turning to awful laughter and becoming louder and louder, filling Hermione's ears. She tried to scream, but no sound came, just a choking noise of fear. She could not even reach out and cover her eyes as the largest shape leaned over and reached out to grab hold of her.

But before it could, someone else did.

Without any warning at all, a hand grabbed her shoulder from behind the tree, wrenching her with it, pulling her away from the creatures. A hand attached to a body that flung her roughly behind it and stood facing the creatures as she cowered in fear and confusion just out of their reach.

A light was coming from somewhere, and looking up, gasping for breath, she could see the owner of the hand.

A man, all in black. He was very tall and very, very pale, almost ethereal-looking in the dim light of the flame torch he held in his other hand. His eyes were pale too, silvery-grey, dark smudges beneath them, and they regarded her with a mixture of mild surprise and alarm. He wore a long cloak with a hood, and his hair was tied at the nape of his neck,over a ragged black silk scarf. The hair was so long that Hermione could not distinguish how far down his back it went, for it was, like the cloak and scarf, completely black. His fingers were warm on her wrist:

"I would say run for your life," he panted, as she stared in shock. "But in the circumstances….just run."

-

* * *

Next time...caves, pyromania, and inadequate footwear. Who could resist? Comments welcome. 

Quote by Isaac Asimov


	3. Two : Shadow And Flame

**Disclaimer: No money made, no disrespect intended. Thanks.**

**Author's note:** Thank you all, Angelic Bladez, Nynaeve80 and Clooless! I never thought anyone else would go for this ship, so the reviews made my day ; )

****

**Summary: ****"****If we were alive today, we would never have met.****"**

**When the Order Of The Phoenix learn of Voldemort****'****s latest plan to use the Veil to experiment with immortality, they embark on a mission to destroy it once and for all. Hermione Granger is nineteen, and in charge of finding the spell that will succeed in this task. But when the mission goes wrong and Hermione is pulled in, who can she possibly turn to for help now she****'****s****…****.well..dead? **

**Two**

**Shadow and Flame**

'_Never fear shadows... that always means there is a light shining somewhere.' _

The mysterious man pulled Hermione with him, and she felt , rather than saw the creatures launch themselves hungrily after the two of them, whispering ever louder as they came.

The two of them raced across the wet grass. Hermione was holding on blindly to his hand as they ran, him half leading, half pulling her as she stumbled over potholes, slipping and sliding on the slimy ground. The shoes she wore were canvas, small and flat; designed for quiet steps over the Ministry's polished floor and wholly inappropriate for this purpose as the grip on them seemed non existent and the fabric yielded easily to the damp and the cold, leaving her feet like two icy stumps. She followed the heavy thud of his own long leather boots, until they reached a small copse of taller trees that she seemed to have missed in daylight.

"Stay here a moment." the man said, looking distracted. "They'll find us in a few minutes, and then they'll wish they hadn't."

"Those things?" Hermione managed to choke out. He nodded once, businesslike and curt.

"They hunt by tracking the essence of your soul. And in a moment, they'll track us to here."

Hermione didn't dare speak again as he took hold of a larger branch and lit it with the smaller torch, helping the spark expertly with two flints he took from a pocket.

"Fire. They hate it." he offered by way of explanation, as he blew on it urgently to raise the flame. As he did so, she caught sight of an old sword in a battered brown leather scabbard, slung heavily from his waist underneath the cloak.

A few minutes later and the fire had caught. Hermione realised her fingernails were digging into her palms with nerves in case it wouldn't catch properly, but it did, to her utter relief.

She heard the whispering noise, a sucking and rattling as the creatures caught up with them at last, the noise louder than ever now. They appeared, sliding above the ground it seemed, through the trees, their wicked eyes slits the same colour as the fire her rescuer held. She shivered and cowered behind him, terribly afraid.

The man waited, seeming to choose his moment with utmost care. Finally, he drew back his arm just as they were almost upon them, flinging the torch straight into the seething dark mass.

The whispering at once changed to an unearthly shriek as the ground in front of the black shapes exploded with the fire. Sparks rushed towards the creatures like a red-hot shower of heat and light.

It reminded Hermione of Harry's recount of his last journey with the doomed Headmaster, the cave teeming with vicious Inferi, but these were not corpses.

At least…they did not look like corpses. There was no smell of burning flesh as the fire hit them, they just seemed to disintegrate…like they had never been solid in the first place.

_Disappeared in a puff of smoke__…_

The fire went out as abruptly as the tall black-haired stranger had started it, leaving no sign that the nightmare creatures had ever been present.

-

The sky had visibly lightened. Hermione stared dumbly at where the smoky creatures had disintegrated.

"Have they…..gone?" she asked, her voice shaking.

"For now."

The man walked over to her, standing before her and putting one hand under her chin to turn her face towards him, eyes narrowed and curious. Hermione flinched, and looked back at him.

It was then she noticed that he wasn't even really a man. As she stared up into the pale eyes, shadowed incongruously by heavy brows as black as the fine straight hair that hung tied in a piece of old velvet ribbon, Hermione realised that he really did look no older than about twenty, not really any older than herself, Harry and Ron. Just a boy, really.

He looked keenly at her, taking in her now very dirty and torn clothing, and wrinkled up his nose.

"Where did you come from, then?" he asked finally."Or rather….when did you come from? That't usually the better question, I've found. What did you do?"

Hermione tried hard to make sense of this peculiar comment, most especially seeing as he seemed to be waiting for her to give him a perfectly reasonable answer. She didn't really like to look stupid, especially in front of an admittedly very attractive saviour, but she couldn't help but stare a little while she stood in front of him, considering her answer.

"Do?" she asked, eventually. " I hardly think I did anything. I must have hit my head..and I woke up. And then I was here."

The man (_boy_…Hermione inwardly corrected herself ), smiled and looked away as if amused at some private joke.

" I see. Got a wand?"

"No."

The boy paused. " _Don__'__t_ tell me you're a Muggle…I didn't think they could come here..."

Hermione suddenly felt rather indignant at his haughty tone.

"You haven't a wand either, I presume? Because if I had mine, instead of a torch, I would have used a Living Fire charm on those, those……things." she said, indignantly. "You'd have learned that charm in the seventh year at school_, assuming _you went to one, and if you actually listened, then you would also know that it was created in 1865 by Liberine Bircher, genius and pyromaniac. I don't believe Muggle schools teach such things." she finished, mimicking his haughty tone a little in her annoyance.

The boy gave a low whistle, raising one dark, well-defined eyebrow.

"Very good. I like it. But you are here, on your own, and I'm assuming that you have no idea how you got here? So that's not really going to help you every much, is it?"

" I just need to find a 'phone. Or some way of getting word to my friends. They'll come and get me."

The boy chuckled. "'Phone?" he said, as if Hermione had just made a highly amusing joke. "I think you're going to be disappointed, you know. Who are you, anyway? What's your name?"

"Hermione Granger. Who are _you_?"

The boy waved the question away.

"Nobody." he said, firmly. " I'm nobody. I learnt that…." he looked around at the rapidly lightening sky…"a while ago…somewhere else. And-" he added, turning back to look at her again. "I don't think your friends will come for you. And now, I have to go. Don't sleep outside again, either, please. You're lucky I was passing. One more moment and they would have had you. But you learn fast. At least, you should."

He adjusted his belt and the old sword that hung from it, and replaced the flint in his cloak. Then, taking one last peculiar glance at her, he gave a small bow and walked quickly away through the trees, shaking his head as if communing silently with himself, before turning a corner out of sight..

Hermione stood, speechless, as the boy disappeared as quickly as he had come. She looked around nervously, in case the creatures had come back, but the daylight had dawned upon this strange countryside as quickly as night had fallen the day before, and she had a feeling that they were the sort of thing that only came out at night.

-

Although Hermione felt stupid running after a boy, especially one whose name she didn't even know, she found the notion of being left again, without any explanation of his enigmatic comments, unbearable.

_I don__'__t think your friends will come for you__…_

Hermione didn't know what he meant, and she squashed down the shapeless fear that kept threatening to break, spilling panic like blood. Blood, staining her logic with wretched impossibilities and making things even more difficult to make sense of. She knew there must be a rational explanation, there almost always was, and this boy seemed to have at least an idea about this place.

However, to her disappointment, by the time she reached the place where he had vanished, between two silver birch trees, there was no sign of him at all, not even the echo of footfalls to suggest in which direction he had gone.

Hermione looked down and saw that she was standing on a rough dirt track with three forks. She chose the right hand one, and quickened her pace down it, all the while searching the vegetation up ahead for the long black cloak of her rescuer, but soon the track was too thorny and overgrown to allow her to go any further. She had no choice but to turn back, so turn back she did, arriving again at the three forks.

This time, she took the left, which was much wider, and she was able to run fast enough to make up for her mistake.

Perhaps he lived here, anyway, she thought, and kept her eyes out for any sign of smoke or a cottage. But there were none, and that path ended in a clearing and a pond whose waters were pale silver and shone like mercury, but instead of being a beautiful sight, it gave off a foul smell like something gone rotten, and quite the most unpleasant feeling of foreboding Hermione had ever known.

Hermione didn't like the look of the silver pond at all, and worried about going nearer, after all, who knew what it was? She turned back once more, retracing her steps, or so she thought, but she never managed to find the fork in the path, or even the path at all.

Though mentally exhausted, she was pleasantly surprised to find that physically she seemed to manage perfectly well, even after running so far. She pushed through the trees beginning to wish that she had something to cut down the branches blocking her way , for though it at first appeared that this was just a small knot of wood, it was now obvious that it went back quite a long way.

Hermione wondered what was on the other side of it, but she also knew that she'd need to find a safe place to spend the night, if she didn't want the shadowy creatures to come slinking through the trees, amber eyes aflame…looking…

She wondered if she would ever see the black-haired boy again as she trudged on through the twisted trunks of trees with yellowed leaves. She looked down at her feet: the shoes had dried off somewhat, even in the damp atmosphere, and now the dirt was caked upon them, staining the canvas with grime. She could feel the dust and dirt between her toes, and her feet ached a little: the shoes had very little padding, and she felt that she had been walking almost solidly for two days. She wasn't hungry, but she wondered what she was going to do when she needed to eat. A brief glance at the vegetation on the floor of the woods told her there was nothing. And even if by some miracle one of the bushes had been able to bear fruit, she thought, it was doubtful it would even be edible. Even the atmosphere in this place reeked of something sour…something gone bad.

There was nothing to see….the wood, like the fields, just seemed to stretch on and on, one part looking almost identical to the next. Hours seemed to slip by, and Hermione thought once that maybe she should mark her way, like Hansel and Gretel in the childhood fairytale, but, she told herself, even if she knew the way back, what use could it be? In any case, if she didn't come upon a house or something soon, likely she would starve to death, or more likely, die of thirst. The human body could survive without food for quite some time, she recalled Snape's voice saying, as he presided over one Potions class past; but without fluids, only a day or two at most. Funny how she didn't feel the need for either. Perhaps she was still in shock?

Hermione wondered when would be a good time to find a shelter for the night. There was nowhere she could see to make camp, no cave, not any kind of hut or shack in which to hide. She wondered whether she should climb a tree and try to sleep within it's peeling branches. Approaching one, she attempted to swing herself up into it's yellow leafed 'arms', but it was not an easy task: the shoes had no grip and the long dress flapped and fluttered and wound itself around her feet maddeningly. Hermione just about managed to pull herself up onto a branch, slippery with some sort of disgustingly thick yellow fungus, and then her grip failed, and she fell backwards onto the ground. As she fell, a sharp twig caught the side of her arm and she felt a sharp momentary sting as the flesh tore.

The back of her head made contact with the hard floor of the wood first, and Hermione was surprised that she wasn't knocked out. She wasn't even dizzy. She looked down at her cut arm, and to her surprise, she wasn't even bleeding, although the cut looked to be fairly deep. More to the point, though, she had seen through the trees as she fell, and the dark blotch of oncoming darkness had already appeared in the sky. She knew she didn't have much time.

Gingerly, she got to her feet once more, taking a few slow steps just to make sure that she wasn't having some sort of delayed reaction. The falling dark was making it difficult to see, though, and despite her desperate attempts to search for cover, she began to panic.

She thought for a brief moment about shouting for the black-haired boy that had rescued her the night before, but what would she shout? She didn't know his name, and anyway, might shouting perhaps attract other, unwanted attention? She didn't want to take the risk.

Even her own footsteps were thundering in her ears now with every step she took. She began to run, hoping she'd find somewhere, anywhere, but then, without warning, she took another step and the ground gave way beneath her feet.

There wasn't time to scream.

A swamp. The name came to her before she could even begin to try and save herself. It wasn't like the Devil's Snare: relax and it would release you. This was different. The bog was so cold it took her breath away, and made her weak with fear , Hermione found she couldn't have shouted, even if she hadn't been so cold.

The slime wrapped itself around her and was slowly, steadily dragging her down. She made one last attempt to scream, but the sound died in her throat. She tried to swim, flail her arms, keep from going under, but the reverse happened. The mud and slime and stagnant waters rose up her chest, crushing her with freezing cold unseen fists.

Hermione closed her eyes, and waited for it to all end. Waited to suffocate, to drown.

The light hit her as a faint glimmer on the eyelids before she heard the shout. A figure was standing on the edge of the bog, hardly visible, but still _there._

_Could it be one of those creatures? What a choice of ways to go__…_

Then she heard the voice she'd heard before:

"Don't move!" it commanded. "I'll get you out, hang on."

But the muddy water tightened it's icy grip. It was thick, viscous, touching her chin by now. It was going to be too late….

She looked up as if by some chance hoping to see the moon and the stars for one last time, and noticed that in this place, there was no moon, and no stars. Hermione closed her eyes at the same moment as the hand closed upon her wrist.

And then she was being pulled up, wrenched up towards the surface, her throat burning, almost enough to distract her from the ringing in her ears. She opened her mouth at last, falling forward onto firm ground, and on top of whoever it was that had pulled her free. Blindly, she clutched at her rescuer, and finally, with a whimper, coughing and gasping, she opened her eyes and found herself looking into a pair of very pale grey eyes, and the very surprised expression of the boy from the night before.

-

Hermione continued to stare at him until he said, in a polite, but slightly strangled voice:

"Er...I could stay here all night like this with a pretty girl lying on top of me, even if she is covered in mud. But I think we ought to be getting out of the dark."

* * *

Next time...spending the night with a strange man? Hmm. Comments welcome. 

_Quoted: Jonathan Santos_


	4. Three : Night And Day

**Disclaimer: No money made, no disrespect intended. Thanks.**

**Author's note:**

To everyone who left me a review for the last chapter, Clooless, Yvonnia, PinkTribeChick, Caged Sparkle and of course MandaPandaAR...I continue to be pleasantly surprised that anyone wants to read this pairing, but you all are proving me wrong. Thank you all: ))

******Summary : "If we were alive today, we would never have met." **

When the Order Of The Phoenix learn of Voldemort's latest plan to use the Veil to experiment with immortality, they embark on a mission to destroy it once and for all. Hermione Granger is nineteen, and in charge of finding the spell that will succeed in this task. But when the mission goes wrong and Hermione is pulled in, who can she possibly turn to for help, now she's….well..dead?

**Three**

**Night And Day**

"_ The things of the night cannot be explained in the day, because they do not then exist."_

"You're a bit useless, really, aren't you?"

The black-haired boy was lighting a fire in a roughly built stone fireplace. After he had managed to get Hermione standing, he had asked her if she was able to walk, to which she'd answered that of course she could, but it turned out that she wasn't able to do this for long.

But for someone so slightly built, he had swung her up into his arms with ease, feeling with his feet in the forest floor, and finally kicking aside a pile of bracken and dead leaves from the foot of a blackened oak tree to reveal a rusty black trap door, roughly two feet wide.

"It's a bit of a squeeze," he said. "And you're not in any fit state for a jump, but you'll have to. You can't stay out here."

Somehow, she did not know how she managed it, but she found herself slipping into the trapdoor, the prospect of being somewhere other than the treacherous dark of the woods overwhelmingly welcome.

It was not a soft landing just as he had warned, but by now, Hermione was past caring: what was another bump or bruise alongside all the others she'd collected today? She'd be black and blue in the morning, but who cared?

There was a soft noise behind her, and she turned to see the boy, voluminous black cloak and sword still in place, and holding up an old fashioned lantern, his pale skin luminescent in the lamplight.

"Hang on a moment….." he muttered, opening the glass front of the lamp and taking out a stub of wax. "There, that's it."

Candles flared into life as he walked along the walls of a small stone underground room touching them with the flame. It was sparse and square and empty, with nothing but a fireplace at one end and a small table with nothing on it. There was a threadbare rug draped before the hearth in a dark shade of green, a three legged stool, and a very dirty and battered black iron bedstead holding a pile of blankets (also green, she noticed) had been shoved in one corner. The blankets were smooth and looked as if they had never been slept on.

The fire crackled into life, and Hermione, steered towards the stool by her rescuer, leaned into it gratefully before his words had filtered through her consciousness. She looked around at him indignantly.

"I'm not useless! But how can I be expected to find my way home in a place I don't know and know nothing about? I've tried…but I just can't seem to get anywhere, find anyone except…except..." she struggled to continue with the effort from earlier, but the boy, who had been pulling one of the blankets off the bed, finished her sentence for her.

"Except me. Yes. Well, then, you were very lucky, weren't you. I've been here quite a while, and believe me, you learn fast. Well…..I suppose some of us do." He put the blanket around her shoulders.

Hermione tried to ignore the reappearance of the haughty tone and rubbed at the cut on her arm that was healing surprisingly rapidly for such a recent injury, and was beginning to itch. The boy regarded her clothing again, with distaste, and took a rag out of his pocket.

"Try to stay quiet." he muttered, wiping her face with water from a small bowl. " It tends to encourage them…otherwise." At Hermione's bemused "Them?" he gestured upwards.

"The Malevolents. Those things.From last night."

Hermione shivered in spite of the fire and the blanket.

"Thank you," she said. "For saving me….both times."

He smiled a little.

"There's nothing we can do about your clothes tonight." he said, prodding the fire thoughtfully. "More's the pity. Tomorrow we can hopefully find a stream of some sort, some way to get the mud off. But not tonight. Too dangerous."

He sat down on the stone floor by the fire whose flames were now crackling merrily and shooting up what must be some kind of chimney. His gaze seemed very intense, the grey eyes unnerving to Hermione, who wondered why watching her was so interesting for him, but she didn't like to say anything.

The boy watched her still, as if he was waiting for her to speak first, and she supposed he wouldn't be disappointed, because she had a great many questions.

"Who are you?" she blurted out at last.

He gave a short bark of a laugh that sounded oddly reassuring, even in the gloomy, echoing room.

"I told you, remember? I'm nobody."

"You must have a name?"

"Why must I?" he rolled his grey eyes.

"Well, everybody does."

"Not me. Not anymore. At least, no name I care about."

The look on his face told her not to ask any more questions, not tonight, at least. Maybe she could ask him again, another time. Maybe there was a reason for him not wanting her to know. She tried a different tack:

"Where are we?" she asked.

The answer came a little too quickly, as if it had been expected and rehearsed for. Flippant.

"No idea."

"You said you'd been here for quite a while, though. So surely you must know?"

"You ask too many questions."

The boy's brows knitted together and he looked away. Hermione didn't want him to leave her alone again in this place, even if he couldn't or wouldn't answer anything , so she fell silent, and watched him quite as intently as he had been watching her, a little while earlier.

He broke the silence first this time, unexpectedly.

"Why don't you tell me about you?" he suggested .

"Well, I did tell you my name," she began. He nodded. "Yes. You told me your name was Hermione. Sounds like a name from a _Muggle_ storybook. Did you make it up yourself?" He grinned slyly, looking at her from under his eyelashes to show her he was joking.

Hermione didn't know why her cheeks suddenly felt hot, but she carried on.

"I left school, Hogwarts, last year," she said. He raised an eyebrow. "Hogwarts?" he asked. "And what house were you in?"

"Gryffindor." came the proud reply. The boy smirked as if at some sort of private joke.

"Should have known. Brave girl, are you? I hope so."

"Why?" Hermione couldn't keep the tremor out of her voice at the foreboding note in his voice.

"Because you'll need to be, here. How old are you? Eighteen?"

"Nineteen,"

The boy suddenly looked wistful. "I was nineteen once," he said.

"Most people are, at some point," said Hermione, smiling. "How old are you now, then? You don't look any older than me, so you must have been quite young when you got here…however you got here."

The boy shrugged. "I've always been nineteen here. I don't know. I was nineteen once. Can't remember being twenty."

A cold feeling crept around Hermione's heart even as she struggled to believe it, but try as she did, she kept seeing the black fronds of the veil, moving closer, closer…touching her cheek…and falling…..

"Are you…..are you …a ghost?" she whispered.

The boy turned his pale eyes to look quite as keenly at her as he had the night before, in the darkness of that night of terror.

"Are you?" he asked.

His voice was light and his eyes were deadly serious. Hermione fell silent. Somewhere in her mind, she supposed that if, as she suspected, she really had fallen though the veil, like Sirius, then she would automatically die. The boy pushed back a lock of fine black hair that had fallen across his face and watched her .

"I don't….think I am.." she said finally "Maybe I 'm…just ……just…..lost? Do you think…..I might be? Lost, that is?"

The boy said nothing for a moment, just looked at her with his own long pale hands folded across one another, and a wistful smile playing around the very edges of his mouth.

"Lost," he echoed, at last. "Yes. Perhaps we both are."

-

"It's light." said an unfamiliar voice a little later, when Hermione, having slept little if at all, awoke on the batterd bedstead in the stone room.

"**I **took the liberty of cleaning those ridiculous shoes of yours," said Hermione's rescuer, crossing the room and picking up the shoes by their laces, the way one might pick up something the cat dragged in.

"They wouldn't have lasted much longer, especially if we're going to be travelling."

"Travelling?" Hermione asked. "Don't you live here? I mean, I thought….."

He laughed, the peculiar short laugh from the night before.

"No. No, I don't live here. I was staying here. As a rule, I am used to far more home comforts, but I was passing through on my way to…….well, on my way to somewhere. It's hard to explain at the moment. In any case, if you want to get…er…..home…you might as well travel with me. Doesn't really seem to be safe to leave you on your own."

"Well….!" Hermione began, but his lazy smirk wrong footed her, and she found herself smiling, too. Daylight was filtering down into the room, presumably from some kind of skylight cut into the earth. She looked around and wondered vaguely who this place had belonged to. It looked as if it had been abandoned some time ago.

"People come and go, here." her companion said, noticing her expression. "You'll get used to it."

"I don't want to get used to it. I want to go home."

He sighed.

"Here," he said, handing her the shoes which really hadn't been cleaned very well. " It's the best I could do in the circumstances, but I'm afraid I have no idea about girls' things. That was always my brother's forte."

"You have a brother?" Hermione asked, taking them and looking around as if said brother might suddenly walk into the room. The boy laughed as he noticed her look.

"Did have. Who knows what happened to him? We didn't exactly get on…well, not in the end, anyway. We used to be best friends, but he left home when I was about fifteen and I only ever saw him once after that."

"I'm sorry," Hermione said softly, a little surprised at this sudden admission from the boy sitting in front of her. He got to his feet shaking his head so his long hair fell around his sharp cheekbones, with the uncomfortable air that he felt he'd said too much. In this new quality of light, Hermione noticed that under his eyes were dark shadows, as if he hadn't slept for weeks.

"Where did you sleep, if you don't mind my asking?" she said.

"Sleep?" he looked a little startled. "Ah…..well, you know, I slept…I slept on the floor. After you went.." he made some sort of gesture towards the bed that she'd spent the fitful night in, and to her astonishment, she noticed he suddenly looked shy.

"We'd better start," he said, after an awkward pause, and then said, rather stiffly, as if he felt he needed to somehow justify himself:

"I'm only taking you with me because I was passing this way, in any case. You should know that I'm better off on my own, and it's not as if there's much company around here anyway. But you'll see that for yourself." he continued, a dark look crossing his fine-boned features.

He picked up his his cloak and slung it around his neck. Hermione didn't quite know what to say. He looked at her and then looked away very quickly. Then he'd gone swiftly to the very back of the room now and was feeling around on the wall.

Hermione caught him up and watched what he was doing. His long fingers moved along the blank wall like they were searching for something, and he had evidently found it, for a moment later, Hermione heard a 'click' and a door shimmered once and solidified in front of her eyes.

"Here." he said abruptly, indicating the doorway. "After you."

It was pitch dark. Hermione felt like they were in a sort of narrow passageway. She could hear the boy behind her, his boots making a soft 'clack' on the stone floor of the tunnel. She quite literally couldn't see her hand before her face, though, and so walked slowly and with trepidation. It was a little unnerving to be in the dark with somebody whose name she didn't even know, but in the circumstances, she reasoned, there wasn't much of a choice. She sensed they'd reached something solid after a short while, and put her hands blindly out, finding nothing and then she felt a hand on her shouder, quite suddenly, making her jump.

"Find the other handle, would you?" he asked polite, but seemingly a little exasperated.

"Don't do that!" she whispered angrily.

"What?" came the amused reply. "Ask you to open the door so we can get out? Fine with me. Let's just stay here in the dark ….." He hummed a little tuneless song to himself.

With that, Hermione grabbed in front of her at nothing in particular and by a stroke of luck, her fingers closed on cold metal. She gave the handle an almighty wrench and shot forward, literally falling out of the door and onto hard earth.

-

**They** were standing, well, he was standing and she was somewhat sprawled, she noted with annoyance, at what appeared to be the foot of a large mountain.

The boy was laughing, closing the door calmly behind him, and Hermione watched as it simply melted away.

"You didn't have to scare me. I don't like the dark." she said, angrily, but he just laughed again.

"Got you to hurry up, didn't it?" He offered her a hand, and with surprising ease, he pulled her to her feet.

She glared at him furiously, and he let her hand go abruptly, widening the gap between the two of them and turning slowly on the spot to survey the landscape. To Hermione's surprise, a slight breeze, the first she had felt since she'd arrived in this place, ruffled his hair and the black scarf he wore about his neck.

It was reassuring to at last have the weather behaving a little closer to normal, to leave behind the ghastly cloying humidity of the woods and fields. She took a great gulp of air, ignoring in her turn the curious look he gave her, and got to her feet once more, brushing her dress uselessly with her hands to try and remove the caked black mud on it, but to no avail. He saw her, and nodded.

"Stream's not far."

"Thanks," she said grudgingly.

"Don't mention it. And that dress would be all right, you know," he said. " If it were clean, that is."

He smiled a little, and for the second time since meeting him, Hermione was reminded of someone else.

She was still trying to ascertain who exactly it was, when they began to walk along the steep path that curved up and around the side of the mountain, but like an elusive word on the tip of one's tongue, it kept escaping her.

_Perhaps this place has addled my brains,_ she thought, as she plodded along after the black-haired boy, whose long legs allowed him to stride with ease, betraying no sign of effort.

_Here I am, with somebody I don__'__t even know, following then somewhere I don__'__t know where , but I don__'__t have any other choice__…_

"Er…" she began, wondering what to call him and settling on nothing. "Er…….where are we going to, anyway?"

"Looking for something," he answered in a sort of closed voice. "Someone. Whichever. Someone who might be able to tell me what to do next, at least, because much like yourself, I'm not too keen on this place either. As I said, precious few home comforts, and not at all what I'm used to."

All this was said, Hermione thought, in a tone quite worthy of Draco Malfoy.Even his voice was similar, that kind (she grinned a little to herself here) of faux upper-class accent undercut with hints of a terrible London drawl. She couldn't help but roll her eyes behind his back, but even so, she was still curious to know about him.

"You're from one of those rich families, I suppose?" she said, making a face behind his back.

He nodded. "Purebloods, of _course_." Hermione opened her mouth to remark on his tone of superiority, and then shut it abruptly as he continued: "And I'd appreciate it if you_ didn't_ make the comment you're about to. It's quite obvious you _aren__'__t_ one yourself. I've never heard your surname before, and you have a certain gracelessness about you that always gives it away."

"Well!" she spluttered indignantly, trying to catch him up and round on him, but when she did, she realised he was grinning from ear to ear.

"You know, I used to believe that." he said, seriously. "Not anymore though."

"Why not?" Hermione asked, forgetting her anger.

"We all die the same in the end, right?"

"Do we?" Hermione asked him.

"Yeah," he muttered. "Well, maybe not all quite the same, but even so."

It was almost impossible to talk, as well, with the steep mountain slope merely trying to retain one's footing was an effort. Once or twice, she slipped, and he, with remarkably quick reflexes, grabbed her hand just in time to steady her, which made her blush slightly, and drop it quickly as soon as she'd set herself right. He didn't talk much, though they did stop to rest occasionally, she suspected this was more for her benefit than for his, as he never seemed to tire. Interestingly, though, Hermione noted that she too was not out of breath, even after the steepest slopes, and attributed this to all the Quidditch she'd been trying to play with Harry, Ron and Ginny in the holidays.

Still, despite his relative quietness, Hermione was grateful to have someone to protect her when the now familiar dark looming patch appeared in the dull grey/blue of the sky.

"We'll stay here the night," he announced, as he steered her down a small ridge. They'd crossed around the mountain, and around the next corner she saw what , on closer inspection by the two of them, appeared to be a small cave, with a tiny stream running some distance away. The boy frowned in thought and then turned to Hermione, indicating the stream with one elegant hand.

"You can wash your dress in there. Be quick. We'll need to make a fire, to dry it." he said. "At the entrance. I don't know what's up here, really, I'm just going the way I heard of."

"Heard from who?"

"Never mind"

By 'what's up here' she assumed he meant something similar to the night-prowling creatures of their first encounter, what had he called them? Malevolents? Hermione shivered.

Perhaps her companion misinterpreted the shiver, because a thought seemed to occur to him at that moment, and he reached up, unbuckling his long, black cloak and handing it to her.

"Here," he said, with a look that Hermione might almost have interpreted as embarrassment. "You'll need……."

He let the sentence trail off, and walked quickly away, keeping his back turned from a discreet distance as she undressed and dipped her dress in the stream. It really wasn't a great deal of help, as the stream itself was a muddy brown, but at least it removed the worst of it. She wrung the forlorn garment out, deciding, as she tried to pull the tangles out of her hair, that vanity may well have to be abandoned in this place. Slinging the dress rather hopelessly over a large flat rock, she wrapped the cloak around herself and walked to join her companion as he looked out across the darkening mountain.

* * *

Quoted: Hemingway. 

Next time...truth hurts, as Hermione finds out. Comments welcome.


	5. Four : A Kind Of Living

**Disclaimer: No money made, no disrespect intended. Thanks.**

**Author's note:**

**To everyone who left me a review for the last chapter, thank you so much. Each and every one is appreciated so very much. Chapter 4, then. I hope you enjoy! **

**Summary : **

**"If we were alive today, we would never have met." **

**When the Order Of The Phoenix learn of Voldemort's latest plan to use the Veil to experiment with immortality, they embark on a mission to destroy it once and for all. Hermione Granger is nineteen, and in charge of finding the spell that will succeed in this task. But when the mission goes wrong and Hermione is pulled in, who can she possibly turn to for help, now she's….well..dead?**

**Four**

**A Kind Of Living**

_"Some things you have to believe.."_

"We need some more wood for this fire." the boy muttered. "And try to keep your voice down would you? I would really rather not attract too much attention tonight."

"Attention?"

He nodded.

"You don't want anything else turning up, do you? Even I don't know all of what's in this place, and most of what I do know I'd rather I didn't."

With this enigmatic remark, he stalked off to grab handfuls of dead scrub. Thankfully, it wasn't damp as the very slight breeze seemed to have dried it a little, and soon the two of them had made a sizeable pile that went up nicely.

-

Sitting at the fire that night, looking at each other through the dancing amber flames, Hermione asked him:

"What did you say those things were again? In the night?"

"The Malevolents." he said softly.

"What do they do?"

"Oh, nothing much."(he gave a weird, sour chuckle) "Only eat your soul. They're parasites. That's what they subsist on. D'you know what Dementors are? "

Hermione nodded.

"Well, they come from here. Nice thought, isn't it? They eat the souls of those who end up here, to gain power."

"How do you know all this," she asked sceptically, wondering briefly if he was making fun of her.

"I saw it happen. Only once, but believe me, that's enough. The screaming-" he looked away suddenly and didn't complete the sentence.

"So you're telling me these things gain strength by consuming human_ souls_? Why?"

"I'm told it gives them enough strength to pass between worlds. Between this realm, and the other."

"The _other_ realm? What other realm, exactly ?" said Hermione impatiently . "Are you ever going to give me a straight answer, or some proper information, or are you just going to talk in riddles all the time?"

He laughed at her, his black hair glinting in the flames, giving him a slightly wicked look.

"Maybe."

Hermione watched him, irritated. For a moment. his gaze seemed to drift off of her, and into the flames, where they danced in miniature reflected in the glassy grey of his hooded eyes.

"You should lie down," he said at last, pointing inside the cave. "You aren't used to this place, as I am."

"Won't you be cold, without your cloak?"

"No. I don't get cold."

She bit her lip, holding the cloak to her chest, wondering how to say what she was about to say without it being _really_ embarrassing.

"Are you….I mean…..don't you want to come. Not like…"

She saw him smirk and close his eyes briefly in the half-light, but his reply was matter-of-fact:

"That won't be necessary."

Hermione nodded, her cheeks burning. "Right.." she managed. "Wake me up when you need me to take over." she said.

He nodded curtly, and settled himself by the fire. Hermione had the strong impression that he wasn't paying much attention to the last sentence, but she retreated inside the cave, which was far from comfortable, but at least it was reasonably dry and she had the cloak, which not only went over her, but was also big enough to pad out the floor a bit. She was surprised to find that, instead of the black and blue skin she had predicted the day before, her skin was smooth and unblemished. Perhaps she had imagined that it was worse than it really had been?

She lay as comfortably as she could down on the hard rock floor. The cloak, though, was thick, luxurious and soft with something of an almost soothing smell about it, very male, like expensive Wizard cologne, and clean, like fresh open air, which was strange in this place. She wondered who he was and why he was being so evasive.

Perhaps she wouldn't need to know. Hopefully they would get to somewhere she recognised soon, or perhaps she'd find a telephone box or something first. She was still apprehensive about this stranger, especially as he was not exactly free with the personal information.

She could still see him, through the mouth of the cave, sitting perfectly still by the fire, studying a grubby piece of parchment he held in his hand but although he glanced round once, when he thought she wasn't looking, he was silent, and so was the mountainside. As she drifted off to a kind of half-sleep, Hermione watched him in-between the vague, incoherent thoughts of an overloaded mind until her eyes got too heavy and finally closed when the dark of the night blended with the small breeze blowing the loose, black strands of his ponytail in a way that was almost hypnotic. Through this, her mind, against the will of exhaustion, continued to wonder just why a face she had never seen could be so familiar.

-

He didn't wake her. The daylight did, for it couldn't be said that there was any kind of distinct sunlight; rather like the dark, the day simply spread out across the sky and stayed there, unchanging until the night spread out over it and took it back again. It would, she thought, be a little less unnerving if she had been able to tell the time by the sky, like her father had taught her to do on Sunday morning walks when she was a little girl, but here, this was impossible.

She was grateful to her mysterious stranger, of course, for not having disturbed her, but another part of her hoped he wouldn't be angry with her for not waking and taking her part in the watch. He might abandon her once more, and then where would she be?

-

He'd kicked the fire out that morning and they had set off again. It was downhill this time and a little easier than before. Hermione glanced at him curiously as they walked, trying to judge his mood by the look on his face, but despite the shadows under his eyes being as dark as ever, he looked no different, no tell-tale crease of the eyes or set of the jaw to betray himself.

She had the disconcerting feeling that he knew she was staring at him, but he was just choosing to ignore it. She turned away, looking over the endless grey of the terrain, as she stumbled on next to him.

"Who else is here?" she asked him once, as they turned a corner and began another uphill path, the road twisting and turning like some sort of perverse rollercoaster.

"Don't know." he answered. " It changes. Some people leave, one way or another. Some don't. Like me."

"What do you mean?"

"Like I said, I've been here quite a while."

"How long?"

"Seems like a lifetime." he said vaguely, and she saw him press his lips together as if to keep from speaking. He hunched his thin shoulders and put his head down, rubbing his face with his cuff as if he was thinking about something unpleasant.

"I said not to speak in riddles," she grumbled.

"Don't ask the questions then." he said, shortly. "You might not like the answers."

"I could decide that, if you'd give me them for once," Hermione grumbled, in a low voice.

He raised an eyebrow.

"Well for most people, it's too late by then, " he commented, and went back to his silence.

They didn't speak again until it was time to make camp. The scenery stayed as grey and unchanging as ever, but they found another cave, smaller than the first one, but it was going to have to do. In any case, she thought, he'd probably just sit and stare at the fire all night. Goodness knows what he thought about, she mused. There isn't much here to inspire a person, so it can't be that he's thinking up poetry.

She giggled a little to herself, for his clothes, standard for Wizard nobility, so he probably really was a Pureblood, as he'd claimed, really did look a little like those of overdressed Muggle poets in old-fashioned pictures.

They carried on in this manner for the whole of the following day. Hermione was feeling more and more agitated, and the grey sky seemed to be getting lower and lower, dusty air as thick as soup. More disturbing still, she had begun to notice that she hardly needed to eat here, having lost her appetite completely, and not even feeling the urge for sustenance despite the fact that they were walking miles upon miles.

In actual fact, the very thought of food made her feel a little nauseous. She had picked a few berries, and even tried to roast some peculiar kind of mushroom over the fire, much to the amusement of her companion, who simply sat and watched her, a slight smile on his finely-cut features, reminding Hermione, again, of somebody else; she was sure that she'd seen that nose and jaw before, but she just couldn't place them. He declined, of course, to partake of her cooking, looking haughtily down his nose and prodding one of the mushrooms with a hand so soft-skinned and pale that she was convinced that he'd never cooked so much as a piece of toast in his life. Goodness knew, then , how he'd survived out here for as long as he'd implied he'd been there. She'd never yet seen him eat. He _said_ he wasn't a ghost, and he felt as solid as anyone should be.

Later, she had retired to that night's cave to attempt to get some sleep, but even that was proving fitful, as if her mind no longer wanted or needed to rest.

She put this down to the stress, and the change in climate, and hoped fervently that she wasn't about to break a fever, for there was surely no doctors near, and she didn't really think that they were in Wales, now….not anymore.

The more agitated Hermione became, the more watchful her companion was, as if he sensed her disquiet. It came to a head that night, when they had finished finding enough fuel for a fire, which had been a lot more difficult that night, as the air had suddenly become damp and cloying again, like it had been in the beginning.

"How do I know, " Hermione said to him, breaking a silence spanning, she thought, more than an hour, as they sat on opposite sides of the fire, whose flames were at last rising high into a low, black sky. "How do I know that you aren't going to hurt me, just when I began to trust you?"

He looked up in surprise, and for a moment, she was thrown by the wide-eyed, boyish expression of surprise he wore. Perhaps he was telling the truth, that he really knew nothing about girls. Especially intelligent girls, Hermione thought, grimly. Well, he was about to find out.

"You do trust me, then?" he said, quite genuinely, with no trace of the smirk he seemed to favour so often as a response to any question.

"I don't know yet," Hermione said, and to her dismay, her voice came out sounding rather childish and petulant.

He raised his eyebrows so high that they disappeared into the hanging black hair that had come loose from it's velvet tie to settle around his jaw-bone.

"I like your reasoning, then. Despite the fact that I have come to your aid twice already, saving you from spirit-sucking parasites, and pulling you out of a swamp, even though I doubt it would have hurt you for long, you still feel that I have some dark agenda, some secret that I'm hiding. Well, perhaps I have….but I guarantee that it has absolutely nothing to do with you."

For the first time, since she'd began questioning him, he actually sounded angry. Hermione resolved to tread carefully, she really didn't want him to take off, leaving her alone in the dark, because despite her need to ask these things, it was her head that needed to know. Inside her heart, she really knew he wouldn't harm her, but some perverse need for information spurred her on to say:

"It's hard to trust you, when you won't even trust _me_ with your name or what you are doing here." she countered.

"You wouldn't believe me if I told you," he said, rather more to himself than to her, but she pounced on the words and said:

"Try me."

He smirked.

"You can call me Mr. Smith." He told her, grinning at the old cliché. "Will that do?"

"It's a start, but that's not you real name, is it?"

"How do you know?" he said, the grin darkening. "It might be."

"I was at school with some Smiths," Hermione told him, shrewdly. "They were all short and chubby and blonde, and they were all in Hufflepuff."

He wrinkled up his nose, and for once in a while, she seemed to have his full attention. He sat up a little straighter, stretching his arms in the sleeves of his dirty-white shirt. Hermione now wore his cloak wrapped tightly about her more as a comfort than a means to warmth, but he didn't seem to mind without it. Hermione noticed for the first time that the shirt had some dark stains that looked like blood around the cuffs and collar. He noticed her looking at them and quickly turned over the material so it didn't show, though whether this was from vanity or another reason, she wasn't quite sure. Very probably a bit of both, from the evidence so far.

Suddenly, he began to talk very quickly, deliberately not looking at her, even though she had not taken her eyes off of him, and was now watching him intently as he prodded the fire with the toe of his boot and muttered, almost as if to himself..

"What you need to understand here is…that thing aren't what you think…" he began.

"What I _think_…?" Hermione began, but he held up a hand to quiet her.

"You talk of home." he said. " But where exactly, or rather, _what_ exactly, do you mean by that?"

Hermione looked at him, wondering what made him ask such a ridiculous question.

"Well," she began sarcastically, " As much as I assume _you _want to get back home to your nice rich _Pureblood_ parents, I'd also like to go home and see my parents and Ron and Harry again. My friends. In London, which is where I live, and you'd better not start doing that superior smirk, either, because I can tell that's where _you_ are from, as well, no matter how you try and cover it up."

He did smirk again, but only briefly, and said, in a very different tone.

"Sorry. When I was very small, my brother used to take me with him when he snuck out of the house to play with the Muggle kids. He was a year older than me, and he liked the Muggles, mostly because he had an ego the size of London itself and couldn't resist the way they worshipped him. Obviously, they had no idea he was a wizard, just believed that he was uncannily good at pretty much everything. It was fun, for a while, until Mother found out." he paused, a shadow passing over his face like he was actually seeing it all happen once more. "She went berserk," he muttered, the accent plain in his voice now, and he made no attempt to hide it. "Said we weren't to play with the _filth_, as she called them,"

Hermione huffed angrily, but he carried on "She used to carry this cane, anyway," he continued, " And after that day, if we even so much as spoke like the kids of London, she would slam it down over our knuckles." he actually winced a little here, and Hermione saw him rub the knuckles of his left hand with the fingers of his right as if recalling the old punishment. "Anyway, I never dared go with him after that, although he still did. I was too scared. He called me a coward, and Mother all sorts of horrible names, most of which were probably true, but there you go. He'd go out with them, and I'd stay at home and be the good son and try to cover for him. It didn't always work, though, and on those days I got Mother's cane for lying for my brother, and then he would come in and threaten to break my nose for letting her find out." he laughed sourly. "Happy times. So long ago, now, though."

Hermione was silent, not really knowing what to say or do. Eventually, she said:

"I don't have any brothers or sisters, and my parents _are _Muggles, so I daresay we had very different lives."

He nodded, and looked up at her. "Like I said, though. We end the same don't we? In this bloody place, and goodness knows if we'll ever leave."

Hermione moved around the fire to sit next to him, and said, in what she hoped was a suitably soothing voice:

"It's only until we get home," She patted his hand awkwardly. "We just have to find out where we are, then we can get help."

To Hermione's surprise, he stiffened at her words;

"I don't think you get it," he said, slowly and carefully, after a long pause. "This isn't the Wizard of _Oz_, you know. We can't get _back._"

A nasty feeling had begun in her stomach when he said this. There was another ominously long pause, and she sensed that he was waiting, pre-empting her next question with the answer ready to deliver.

"The Wizard of Oz was never a real wizard anyway," she muttered, more to herself than to him, but she felt him shift beside her.

"I think you _are_ a ghost, really." she told him, suddenly. "I know you don't sleep at night. You don't get tired. I've never seen you eat anything. And what's worse, it's starting to happen to me, too. Why? What's going on? Tell me!"

"I'm not a ghost." he said, with a deep sigh. " Not as such. Something happened to me, it's a long story. But we can't go home from here. It's not that simple."

"Not a ghost _as such_! So you're telling me we're in some sort of other world then?" Hermione said, angrily.

"How ridiculous! _And_ you talk about your childhood as though it were forty years ago!"

"It was the Sixties." he answered flatly.

"You're my age, and I most definitely was not alive in the Sixties." Hermione told him.

"_You_ said you were nineteen," he said "but how is that, if you weren't around then?"

"I was born," Hermione said, loudly and clearly "In 1979. The nineteenth of September. And as far as I am aware, whatever this bloody place is, the year is 1998."

She knew he was staring at her, but as far as she was concerned this had gone far enough. She stood up and stormed away from him into the cave, flinging herself down and sobbing in a corner. At first she thought he was just going to stay quiet and sit staring into the flames again like he did every night, but then suddenly, she heard quiet footsteps and someone knelt down in front of her. She opened her eyes, rubbing her sleeve furiously across her face in a futile attempt to disguise the tears, and found herself on a level with him, his grey eyes looking into hers, but there was no anger there.

"Hermione," he began gently, and somewhere she was aware that it was the first time he had actually called her by her name. She hadn't even been sure he'd remembered it.

"Hermione," he said again, reaching out nervously and touching her cheek with those long, pale fingers. "You need to try and believe me. We're both dead. That's what we're here for. We died."

"Howe can you know that?" she said, shrilly, trying to keep her voice steady and failing miserably; it wavered like a child's. "How can you be so sure?"

He swallowed.

"I'm sure." he said, quietly. "I'm sure because if we were alive today, we would never have met. You just told me you were born on September 19th, 1979. That was the day I died."

-

* * *

Quoted: Coldplay - Speed Of Sound. 

Comments very welcome...


	6. Five : The Brightest Star In Leo

**Disclaimer:Not mine, no money made. Thanks.**

**Author's Note:Thanks to everyone who has read so far in and especially those of you who have taken the time to leave me feedback! I hope you enjoy this chapter.**

**Summary: "If we were alive today, we would never have met."**

**When the Order Of The Phoenix learn of Voldemort's latest plan to use the Veil to experiment with immortality, they embark on a mission to destroy it once and for all. Hermione Granger is nineteen, and in charge of finding the spell that will succeed in this task. But when the mission goes wrong and Hermione is pulled in, who can she possibly turn to for help now she's….well..dead?**

**Five **

**The Brightest Star In Leo**

_When I was alive, I believed- as you do - that time was at least as real and solid as myself, and probably more so. _

_I said 'one o'clock' as though I could see it, and 'Monday' as though I could find it on the map; and I let myself be hurried along from minute to minute, day to day, year to year, as though I were actually moving from one place to another._

_Like everyone else, I lived in a house bricked up with seconds and minutes, weekends and New Year's Days, and I never went outside until I died, because there was no other door. _

_Now I know that I could have walked through the walls._

_-_

Hermione stood up and pushed him away; difficult as she only came up to his shoulder. She began to pace in silence up and down the small space of the cave. Her companion watched her in silence, his grey eyes occasionally drifting over to the cave entrance ostensibly to make sure the fire wasn't burning low, but aside from that, he simply sat there, waiting as if, if he gave her enough time, she'd accept the facts.

Hermione liked facts. They made her feel secure. She thought of herself as somebody who refused to be dissuaded from her own opinions, and established ways of doing things. She fixed her eyes upon her shoes as she paced, and attempted to reason with the a world that was suddenly not the one she knew.

"It's not possible," she said, more to thin air than to him. "It's not possible or logical. You don't…I mean….when you die, you don't come here and walk and talk, and I….I….."

She put her hands over her eyes and rubbed the palms hard into her eye sockets as though, if she rubbed away the sleep, this wouldn't be real.

He propped his head on one hand, and spoke through his fingers, seeming oddly nervous all of a sudden.

"If it helps anything, I've been wandering this place for a lot longer than you. But I only managed to get somewhere when you turned up." he said quietly. "I didn't live long enough, anyway, to make sense of any of this stuff the way I expect some people could, but now you're here, maybe we can find some answers."

"Answers for _what_, though? " Hermione said, sitting down abruptly on the cave floor and covering her face with her hands again. "I don't know why I'm here, or what happened to me. All I want is to get out."

"We both do." came the reply, so soft she might not have heard it at all.

-

The next day, incredibly, the sun, or at least _a _sun, Hermione thought, was in the sky, climbing over the tops of the mountains that they were leaving behind and for once, Hermione was able to take off the thick travelling cloak of her companion. He put it back on at once, clearly liking the effect of the 'swishy' fabric, indeed, as the passed by a small stream, she actually saw him stop and admire his reflection, smoothing his long hair a little in a way that was so reminiscent of Gilderoy Lockhart that she giggled in spite of herself.

"What's funny?" he asked, turning those wide boyish eyes upon her again. Even if he _was_ dead, as he told her he was, her companion certainly didn't look like a ghost. She could hardly believe it of herself, either, for she felt as solid as he did when she'd squeezed his arm and leg in a effort to see that he wouldn't just melt away. He let her do it, in fact, for the first time since they met, she noticed colour high on his prominent cheekbones, as if he'd rather enjoyed her experiment, and then, without warning, he did the same to her, only he lifted her right up off of her feet and swung her around on the spot until she laughed so hard she almost forgot that they were _dead_, and surely being dead was no laughing matter.

But hysteria was not Hermione's style. It was in her nature to be patient. Besides, it could have been worse. In some small way, her companion reminded her a little of Ron, who would have liked to be a hero but it always seemed to elude him. Ron was, of course, never as obviously vain as this boy was, but the inherent sense of safety she felt whenever she was with him was the same, as well as the sudden wide-eyed looks he gave her, though his eyes were not the keen , honest blue that Ron's were, but hooded, darker than that, full of something slightly less innocent that Hermione realised that she was trying not to think about, though her mind kept coming back to it.

Even so, she took to staying up through the night with him, liking the fact that she could now do this without fear of failing class or being too tired to answer each and every Professor's questions in class. He seemed to be pleased with this arrangement as well, and didn't seem to object when she moved closer to him as the night wore on, occasionally closing her eyes, and resting on his arm for a brief nap, for it was now all she needed.

And she never knew it, but he' d begun to watch her when she had her eyes closed, thinking about all the things his mother used to say. This girl had told him she was Muggle-born as if she had expected revulsion and prejudice from him, and, he admitted to himself, once she probably would have got it. But this close, he couldn't help noticing that he liked the kink of her hair around her jaw, and the way her eyelashes looked, closed peacefully on pale cheeks, and he wondered in his own turn whether she would judge him when she found out what he was. And how long it would be before she stopped being satisfied with his vague statements about his past and wanted more answers. He sensed that it would not be long.

-

Both of them welcomed the sudden change in the place, from a grey, menacing sky to one that was an almost benign blue. The nights were still abrupt and treacherous, but while the daylight lasted, they travelled side by side, now across more fields, having left the mountains behind the day before. Hermione was a little worried, no mountains meant no caves, but her companion seemed to know where he was going, occasionally referring to the same piece of torn and dirty parchment he'd been looking at before.

"What is that thing you keep looking at?" Hermione asked him that afternoon just as they were about to start walking again.

"Directions." he said shortly, refolding it and shoving it back inside his trouser pocket.

"Can I see it?"

He pulled it back out and tossed it over to her.

"You won't be able to read it," he told her. "It's written in some language I don't understand. I'm only going by the drawings the fellow's done,"

"What fellow?"

He suddenly looked very awkward, and paused, as if he didn't really want to answer.

"The fellow I got it from,"

"The _fellow _you got it from? Well, if he drew it, why did you not ask him to write it in proper English?"

Another awkward pause as he prodded some sort of tatty mauve wildflower with the toe of his boot.

"I sort of, couldn't really ask him." he said eventually, winding black hair around his wrists and letting it go free so that it slid off of his thin white wrist like liquid.

Hermione looked impatient.

"What do you mean you 'sort of couldn't ask him'? she demanded.

"He couldn't have told me," her companion answered, "Because he was the person I saw the Malevolents get. I went to him after they'd gone. To try to help him," he said frowning when he saw her look of disapproval.

"So you decided you'd turn out his pockets? Very honourable."

A petulant expression settled upon his fine features, sucking in his hollow cheeks.

"It was in his hand, actually. It was no use to him, anyway. And before you ask, which I know you are about to," Hermione had opened her mouth, and closed it again abruptly, looking a little embarrassed that he had pre-empted her. "...I have no idea where he got it. That's also where I got the sword, in case you were wondering. It was useful. Nothing more. I don't believe in wasteful sentimentality. It's everyone for themselves here."

"But you saved me, twice,." Hermione looked up at him. He looked away.

"So I did."

Hermione studied the paper.

"It's in Runic," she said, after a moment. "didn't you ever do Ancient Runes?"

"I did Divination," he said.

Hermione gave a long irritated sigh. "Brilliant."

"I failed," he supplied helpfully. Hermione grinned in spite of herself.

"I won't hold it against you," she muttered.

**-**

**That **night's camping spot was far from comfortable, though they were lucky to have found anywhere at all. A large tree had rotted away, leaving a hollow that was just big enough for two people to sit comfortably. The fire burned just outside, kept low so the dry wood wouldn't catch, and thankfully, the night was still.

Hermione had never quite become used to the empty black sky in this place, devoid of lights from airplanes, the peaceful, glowing presence of the moon and mysterious glitter of stars. She laid on her back just outside the tree, not liking to go in too far as it had a distinct musty, animal smell. Her companion was poking the fire with a stick close by.

Hermione thought of the telescope her father had bought her when she was nine years old, after she'd expressed a childish wish to fly, so that she could be closer to the stars. She'd learned their names, and how to recognize the Big Dipper and the constellations of the Zodiac. Virgo, her own starsign, and all those in between, and then she'd moved on to other things, got bored as children do but the telescope had stayed, gathering dust in the spare bedroom. It had still been there when she'd left for Hogwarts when she was three weeks short of her twelfth birthday.

"I miss my parents," she said suddenly, aloud.

Her companion gave a small start that she'd spoken and looked surprised.

"Do you?" he asked. "I don't miss mine,"

"You must miss them sometimes," Hermione said, still looking at the sky. "If I am really dead," she continued. "Perhaps they are crying over me now. Maybe there's been a funeral, poems, readings, a headstone. There might be a grave that's actually my grave, and all the while I'm here with you," She laughed unexpectedly.

"Maybe……maybe this happens all the time. Why is it we don't see anyone else, though, here?"

Her companion, who had been dangling the stick in the fire absently, apparently deep in thought, dropped it as it caught fire.

"I think," he began uncertainly. " I think that not everyone comes here. My father, for example. He died before I did, and I never saw him. And my friends, some of them died too. But I only ever saw a handful of others come through here, and none I ever knew. I believe.." he paused, as if searching for the right combination if words , "that maybe you come here if you still have to make something right.Like me. And maybe like you."

"I wasn't evil in my life, if that's what you mean!" Hermione said. " Not like a murderer. Or Voldemort. Or a Death Eater."

She spoke to the air, more thinking aloud than expecting him to understand about Voldemort and the way things had been., because after all, why would he? It was only after a few minutes she felt the unignorable weight of his gaze upon her and the incessant tap of one of his fingers on the dry earth.

"What's the matter? She asked, a little nervously. "Your friends…..must have been quite young, right? They….weren't er…..Death Eaters, were they?"

The pause that followed could have spanned years as far as Hermione was concerned.

"No," he said at last. "My friends weren't Death Eaters."

Hermione sat up.

"Well, that's good news, at least." she said, trying to make light of the conversation and giving him a faint smile that he didn't return.

What he said next made her blood run cold.

"I was the Death Eater."

-

"No."

Denial as flat and unyielding as the hard floor of earth that they sat upon. Hermione got to her feet.

"All this time, and you never thought to tell me this? Oh, I'd guessed by now that you had come straight from Slytherin, if you'd been to Hogwarts, even if it was years ago. But I thought you were one of the rare ones. The ones that aren't _all_ bad. And now you tell me that not only that, you joined _him_ as well?"

He covered his face with his hands. "I never meant to…….I made a mistake."

"I'll say!"

Hermione was pacing furiously.

"Your name _isn__'__t_ Mr Smith either. I want the truth!"

Her companion moved his hands away and looked narrowly at her through the firelight.

"No," he said, very quietly. "No, of course it's not, and I don't think you believed me for one moment in the first place that it was."

Hermione pressed her lips together and tried to stop her throat feeling like it was closing up on her enough to ask

"What is it then?"

He got to his feet, walked a little way away towards the dead trunk of the tree before he finally turned around to face her. He gave an ironic, sweeping bow and flung back his hair so she could see his face, white and wide-eyed in the fireglow.

"Regulus Black," he said bitterly, spitting out the words as if he was choking on the taste. "Favourite son and heir, Slytherin, Death Eater and little idiot, as my dear brother would say. At your service."

"Regulus?" Hermione said, when the shock had worn off a little. "_Regulus_? No, it can't be Regulus."

"It's an unusual name, but not as peculiar as all that, surely?"

"_Regulus_ Black, though? Sirius' little brother?"

"Sirius' little brother," he mimicked to himself. "Oh, please. Not you as well. All my life long…..and then some. Please, for gods sakes don't tell me you fancied him as well. I can't die twice, but I will certainly try." He looked like he really meant it, too.

"I don't think you understand," Hermione said. " I'm sorry…er…..Regulus," the name sounded odd and alien on her tongue after so long thinking of him as simply 'him'.

"I'm really sorry, you know, but your brother is dead, too. He died three years ago. I was sixteen, by the way. He was thirty-six."

"Oh," Regulus said. "I never saw him. He didn't come here either."

Looking at him now, in this new light, Hermione could see exactly why she had found him familiar. The same pointed, upturned nose, eyes a little paler, a slightly narrower jaw, but there was definitely something of Sirius in his brother's mannerisms, and Hermione thought, they would both have the same long, graceful neck if he'd take off that ragged scarf once in a while.

"How did Sirius die?" he asked.

-

Regulus barely said a word as she retold the tale beginning from her third year. He had pursed his lips in a most Sirius-like manner when Hermione repeated the reason for his brother's incarceration in Azkaban, and said, " That's not Sirius. There's no way he'd have betrayed James Potter. He loved him far more than he ever loved me."

He'd laughed when she'd told him about the Hippogriff ride "Bet he loved that, the prat," and to Hermione's surprise, nodded when she mentioned Sirius had been an Animagus.

"You knew?" she questioned. Regulus nodded again. "Yes, but he swore me to secrecy. He used to try and get out of family dinners when Uncle Cygnus came with our cousins. He'd only talk to Andie…Andromeda, that is, and one day I followed her down to the river at the end of our garden. I saw her stroking a dog, a black dog, and I realised what he'd been up to all that time locked up in his room. He was more angry, really, about what else I saw him doing with Andromeda when he changed back. But he ran away a little while after that, and Andie married someone else."

"I know." Hermione said. " I saw the holes on your family tapestry."

Regulus narrowed his eyes.

"How come you know about the tapestry?" he said. "You're Muggle born, right? So how is it you saw it?"

"Harry lives there. James' son." Hermione said, a little heavily. "Sirius left it all to him when he died. The house, that is. And Kreacher."

Regulus looked round sharply "Kreacher's still alive?" he asked.

Hermione nodded. "They think he's a bit mad, actually, but yes, he's still alive."

"And has Harry, Harry Potter…has he ever, by any chance, to your knowledge, asked Kreacher anything about me?"

Hermione wondered why he was suddenly sounding so concerned. "No," she said. "Harry only ever asked Kreacher about Sirius."

Regulus pushed his hair back and rolled his sleeve up absently, examining a set of small scars along his right forearm.

"Figures," he said sullenly, reminding Hermione suddenly of Sirius when he was shut up in the hated family home. "It was always all about Sirius. Even after he left home. Now after he died. Even when he wasn't there, he was all they talked about. I sometimes used to wish the bloody hat had stuck me in Hufflepuff, just so they'd talk about _Regulus_ for a change, without comparing me to him in some sort of light."

He spoke bitterly, but Hermione could hear the sadness underlying the self-deprecatory tone.

When Hermione did finally close her eyes after a night of so much talking and so many questions,, she was woken again by an odd noise.

It took her a moment to realise where she was, and when she did, the first rush of fright at the unfamiliar sound dissipitated as she realised what it was.

Regulus Black was crying quietly, his shoulders shaking almost inperceptibly as the fire burned low, making his pale skin look luminescent against the dark curtain of his hair.

Hermione didn't ask what the matter was. She didn't need to, because she'd seen enough of the Weasley family to know that no matter how much you argued with a brother, there was still that unbreakable bond. She had the feeling there was more to the story between the two brothers, as well, but tonight wasn't the time for that. Maybe he'd tell her, someday. After all, who knew how long they would be here…it could be forever as far as she knew.

Silently, she got to her feet, and crawled out of the hollow. Her feet caught a twig, which snapped, and Regulus looked up abruptly, dark shadows even more evident under his tear-streaked eyes. He opened his mouth to say something to her, but she simply put her arms around him and held him close.

To her surprise, he didn't move away, but seemed grateful for the contact. She stared into the darkness as he rested his head on her breast, but he didn't cry any more.

"He was still my brother," he choked out, at last, raising his head finally.

His eyes met hers as they held each other in the firelight. Hermione's stomach did a backflip as she realised she was able to look down at him, nose to nose, so close she could see the tears making dewdrops on his long lashes, the fabric of his cloak soft under her hands, but thin enough to let her feel the well-defined shoulders underneath it.. She had been caressing his arm absently, stroking his back in the hope of comforting him but now thoughts of comfort had changed, the atmosphere between the two of them steeped in anticipation, his eyes dark and hooded as ever. He really _did_ look like his brother, she thought, in that moment, only like a sort of reverse Sirius. Sirius made sinister, with his hollow cheeks and eyes full of shadows and guilty secrets.

Hermione leaned towards him, and brushed a kiss on his cheek.

"I know," she said quietly. "I know."

-

Later, in the quiet of the night, Hermione found herself looking up at the sky again; blank and starless.

If she were still at home, she would be able to see Sirius, the Dog star, the constellations of the Big Dipper, Virgo, and Regulus, the little King , the brightest star in Leo.

* * *

Quoted: The Last Unicorn by Peter Beagle.

Comments very welcome.


	7. Six : Over The Edge

**Disclaimer:****Not mine, no money made. Thanks.**

**Author's Note:****I just want to say a big thank you to everyone who left me a review for the last chapter! So many and that's great and unexpected at the same time! I hope you enjoy this one just as much. It's a long one...**

**I also wanted to address the question that some of you have asked about the whole Sirius/Regulus issue. Resolution? Who knows, but I don't think it would be very like Sirius to stay _entirely_ out of his little brother's fanfic, do you...? **

**--grins evilly--**

**Summary: ****"If we were alive today, we would never have met."**

**When the Order Of The Phoenix learn of Voldemort's latest plan to use the Veil to experiment with immortality, they embark on a mission to destroy it once and for all. Hermione Granger is nineteen, and in charge of finding the spell that will succeed in this task. But when the mission goes wrong and Hermione is pulled in, who can she possibly turn to for help now she's….well..dead?**

**Six**

**Over The Edge**

_'It's always have and never hold  
You've begun to feel like home  
What's mine is yours to leave or take  
What's mine is yours to make your own...' _

_**-**_

When the light came the next morning, neither of them spoke about the night before, but the atmosphere between them had altered, imperceptibly. In daylight, you could think more and Hermione thought now, with a clear head. The boy she was travelling with was now not just anyone, but Sirius' younger brother. She remembered a conversation overheard while she'd sat with Ron eating lunch in the drawing room of Grimmauld place. It was strange to think that she, too, had lived in the house her companion had grown up in. Regulus Black, the 'little idiot' Sirius had talked about with such disgust. The Death Eater who ran away, to be murdered by Voldemort.

By rights she supposed, she should hate him, but it was hard to do that, knowing him now, as she did. She even understood why he hadn't wanted to tell the truth about who he was when he'd first rescued her. He probably thought she'd judge him too, just as Sirius seemed to have done.

Perhaps he thought the same, because he kept looking at her, almost nervously, out of the corner of his eyes as they walked. She wondered how she really did feel about him now. Did his revelation alter anything? He'd admitted to being a Death Eater, but he had died because he wanted to stop. Surely that counted for something?

-

The map lay spread out on a large, flat stone as Hermione pored over the runic characters.

Regulus was similarly spread out on the grass nearby, long legs folded over one another and his eyes closed as one lazy hand smoothed the long hair he had undone from it's velvet ribbon. The ribbon lay discarded on the grass, and Hermione found herself watching his hand move through his hair almost hypnotically, until, as if he somehow knew she was watching him, he opened one eye and grinned at her.

"Do you ever stop fiddling with your hair?" she snapped, irritably, turning her attention back to the map.

"You can do it for me, if you like," he said lazily, closing his eyes again, and stretching out in the field they were sitting in, which, unlike the dead, yellowing first ones Hermione had walked through, was lush and green and full of wildflowers . She wondered how a place could be so different, even the air seemed to have cleared a little, though there was still only greyish skies and a hint of thunder in the air. Hermione wondered briefly if it could even thunder, in a land where you were dead.

"No, thank you." Hermione told him curtly. "You can attend to your own beauty routine. I'm busy."

Regulus gave a short bark of laughter, and once again, Hermione was jerked back to memories of another man, an older man who'd laughed like that. She forced herself to turn back to the map, trying to make out the sketched pictures Regulus had obviously been trying to follow.

On one edge of the map, whoever wrote it had scribbled black lines in a kind of cloud-shape, with one word written above it. Hermione screwed up her eyes to read the tiny print.

"Void." she read aloud. Regulus opened his eyes abruptly and leant over to see what she was looking at.

"Pardon?"

Hermione pointed to the dark space on the map.

"It says 'Void'," she repeated, looking up at him. "It looks a bit like the place I woke up in. I felt like I'd been knocked out, and then I woke up there. There was this mass of dark stuff in one corner of the field. Like a fog, only it looked like it was concentrated around one place."

Regulus looked interested suddenly.

"What were you…er…..doing, then, exactly, when you came through to here?" he asked.

"What do you mean?" Hermione asked him, puzzled.

Regulus clicked his tongue, a little impatiently.

"How'd you _die_?" he said harshly, as if for some reason he wanted to remind her of the bizarre circumstances under which their camaraderie had been forged.

Hermione sat back and thought hard.

"I can't recall," she said, finally. "We were looking for something. I remember that much. Harry and Ron and I were looking for……."

She tailed off, trying to think back into her mind as to where exactly she had been at the time, but nothing came. It was if her mind and memories of that time had been wiped clean with a cloth. She rubbed the side of her head in frustration.

"I don't know," she said at last. "In any case, we need to move. There's no shelter here and I have to finish translating this. The drawings are completely indistinct on this next part. You'd never have been able to make them out, but the words are still readable."

Regulus nodded, and tied his hair back carefully with the frayed old ribbon before getting to his feet. He straightened his cloak first, and then, as if he'd just remembered he was a well-brought up Pureblood wizard, he offered Hermione his slender hand to help her up.

She rolled up the map and took it as they walked on. He didn't let go straight away.

-

Later that night, when shelter had been found (a tall, narrow cave at the foot of a smallish hill upon which sat a curiously shaped black rock) Hermione pored some more over the faded parchment with it's mysterious runic script.

"Void," she said again, under her breath, tracing the faint line the maps' previous owner had scratched on the fragment of vellum. Then came "Trail" (this, she decided, must have been the endless fields she had walked through on her first day here, then "Trees", "Swamp" (she knew exactly what that was, she thought, grimly) and a series of arrows pointing downward. That must have been how Regulus had discovered the underground room, she decided. Perhaps it had once been more of a house there and was now just used for travellers to avoid the very real night terrors of this place.

Regulus moved around the fire to sit next to her, reading over her shoulder.

"If I had something to write with," she said, half to him, and half to herself as he settled next to her on the log she had found to use as a makeshift 'bench', "This would be a lot easier."

"What have you got?" Regulus asked her, leaning over and angling the map she was holding up a little for a better look. His fingers momentarily closed over hers, and it wasn't until he repeated the question, in a slightly amused tone, that she realised she hadn't answered.

"Oh," she said, flushing. "This bit where it said _void_ must be where I got here, however I did. Then it has the route I followed, until I met up with you _here_," she put her finger on the downward arrows. "Then it says "Mountains"- we've done them," she continued with the air of someone mentally ticking off homework assignments. "Then there's a sketch that looks like it's supposed to be more fields, which is probably where we are now. And then…." she frowned in thought. "Then the drawings are virtually indecipherable, but the words remain."

"And you…you can read these, can you?" Regulus said, sweeping his long hair out of his eyes and mirroring her frown at the writing.

"Yes," Hermione told him. "Most of them….sort of make sense. Like the next one: "Stream", and after it: "Fall", I don't know what that could be, but I suppose we'll find out soon enough. But then there's something called "Keeper's Gate". Then after that, "Forest," another easy one, then "Burnt Cottage" which just sounds horrid. But I can translate all of those apart from these last two," she said.

"Why not?"

"Well, I've tried and tried, but they don't make any sense. The thing is, there's no doubt that the wording is correct, it's just…the term, as it were." It's this part here,"

Hermione pointed at the very end of the map where another dark arrow appeared to point right off the edge of the map, but with no explanation,

"This one means 'soul'.And this one (she jabbed the second) is the translation for cross or crossing. Soul Crossing."

"That's where the map's meant to lead, though, isn't it? So there must be something there. Something we need to get out of here. Or," she continued in a low voice, " Some thing to at least tell us where to even start."

Regulus didn't say anything for a moment, just stared at her hand pointing to the words on the map as if he was trying to sink into the page by the power of the mind. Then, slowly, he nodded, and just said, in a vague sort of voice

"Yes. Yeah." and then, noticing the curious look Hermione gave him, spoke a little more briskly. "Well, can't do much tonight, though. It'll be light soon, and then we'll look for.." he looked back at the parchment still dangling in Hermione's hand.

"A stream, then. And whatever else."

"Are you all right, Regulus?" Hermione asked him, wondering if she had said or done something to cause his sudden peculiar mood.

"Yes, of course." A little too quickly.

"Is something wrong?"

"No…..I was just thinking."

"About…?"

"Doesn't matter."

Hermione sighed "Boys…."

Regulus stared at her, his eyebrows lowering, looking angry.

"_Don__'__t_ call me a boy. You sound like Sirius."

Hermione looked up at him, having meant the comment lightheartedly and now utterly astounded he was looking so furious.

"I'm sorry," she began. "I didn't mean.."

"I haven't been a boy for a long time," he cut across her, his fingers clenched. "You have no idea of the things I've seen."

"I know you were a Death Eater," and to her horror, her voice sounded far more spiteful than she'd intended. "I'm sorry…" she began again, trying to take it back, but Regulus still looked angry, his voice low and hurt.

"It wasn't a game. Oh, yes, some of them thought it was, but if you think _I_ was one of them, one of those filthy animals that took some sick pleasure in going out and killing people…killing _kids, _(his voice had gone shrill all of a sudden, harsh in the quiet of the night and the still landscape) then you don't know me. But that's fine. None of them really knew me. None of them knew me at all, not even my own brother. I never killed anyone either, that's why I left. Because I never could do it, and you can only bluff it out for so long. And even though you say _he__'__s_ still out there, alive, one day he'll know…..the Dark Lord. He'll be sorry for what he did to me."

As if he'd suddenly realised what he was doing and where he was, Regulus stopped as abruptly as his outburst had started. He looked slightly stunned for a moment, perhaps that he'd had it in him at all.

Hermione, fairly speechless herself, watched him stalk away into the cave, leaving her alone by the fire. She didn't really want to be out there alone, but neither did she want to go after him, so she prodded the fire with a long stick until the flames leapt higher and higher, making abstract shapes and long shadows. Hermione tried not to drift into the peculiar kind of 'trances' she seemed to end up in, in lieu of sleep now, which, when one was dead, she reasoned, seemed rather redundant, but she liked to rest her mind all the same.

She didn't know how long she'd been dozing when she realised there was a very tall shadow standing right next to her, and it was talking to her.

"Sorry," it mumbled, thrusting a ball of black fabric at her, and then,

"Thought you might be cold."

Hermione looked at Regulus, his pale face illuminated in the leaping flames, dark shadows even more prominent underneath those haunted eyes.

"It's ok," she said, softly, and patted the space next to her. "Sit down. Don't lets talk about it any more."

Regulus silently took the space next to her, folding his long legs in front of him, ankles crossed. They sat like that in silence, just looking into the flames, until a chilly breeze began , and Regulus took the cloak Hermione still had balled up in her lap and draped it carefully about her shoulders. Unconsciously, she leaned into his touch and the warmth of his arm, and although if his heart could still beat it would have been pounding in his ears with nerves, he held her close and together, they watched another day begin.

-

The stream was found easily, not by sight, but by Hermione's sharp ears. They'd been walking for twenty minutes or so (though Hermione had no idea how they measured time in this place, or even _if_ they did) looking for the map's next signpost to the mysterious 'Soul Crossing', but with no success. Then she'd had the idea of simply _listening_ for the sound of the water. She squeezed Regulus' hand lightly, and said 'Shhhhh!' and sure enough, the faintest trickling and singing of flowing water could be heard, a little way over to the left.

They trudged towards the sound, Hermione's feet getting damp from the droplets of water hanging on the long grass, and Regulus' boots clumping heavily through it until they reached the stream. It flowed generously from a somewhere that looked as if it was up in the mountains, and was as clear and unspoilt a stream that Hermione had ever seen in her life…or her death, she thought wryly. She ran towards the water, leaving Regulus to hang back and look on as she splashed her hands joyfully in the cool water.

"I can wash! Finally, I can wash!" she sang happily. "You wouldn't have a handkerchief or anything, would you?" she asked him suddenly. " I want to finally clean myself and this dress up."

He put his hand into the pocket of his trousers and drew out an immaculate silk handkerchief with dark green embroidery in the corner. Hermione ignored the monogram (probably the stupid Black family motto) and dipped the square of fabric into the stream, wiping her face with it, before dipping it back and rubbing at the now-faint mud stains still on her dress. Regulus, who never seemed to look anything less than groomed, never appeared to get dirty no matter how far they walked or how dusty the path, but he did edge to the waterside and dip his hand gingerly in the water before quickly withdrawing it and retreating back to watch Hermione without comment , wondering at the ways of Gryffindors.

He undid his hair and began to smooth it out the way he liked it. Hermione was wading up to her knees in the cold water now, and laughed at the sight of him 'preening' as she called it.

"Sirius used to hog the only bathroom without a ghoul in it at your parents' house just trimming his moustache every morning," she had teased him only the day before. Regulus didn't want a moustache, not that he had much choice in the matter now, but even so, he'd always thought Sirius had looked ridiculous. He wondered whether he would have changed his mind by and by. He didn't think so.

Hermione splashed him and the water landed mostly at his feet. He gave her a look of mock-warning, privately wondering how a Muggleborn girl could look so damn beautiful standing with her hair wet and her dress hitched up in the middle of a stream, and decided that his mother really had been wrong about so many things, and if Sirius had been wrong about the moustache after all, then at least he had been right about that.

Hermione was in higher spirits than she had been before as they followed the stream in the direction marked on the map. She walked carefully, looking for the next marker. All they had to go on was an oblique clue on a scrap of ancient parchment. She could tell that Regulus was being similarly cautious; he too walked more slowly than his usual long stride from long legs, normally she would often struggle to keep up.

-

Once again, they heard the clue before they saw it, for after a while, a low rumbling roar of water reached their ears. Hermione began to run a little, hoping to find where the noise came from, and then, as they turned a corner, it came in to view.

Three streams converged from different directions to create one, almighty, magnificent waterfall.

Regulus caught Hermione up as she gasped in sheer awe at the glorious sight before them. It was surely the most wonderful thing she had ever laid eyes on, she thought, even before she…..(she could not bring herself to say _died _even inside her head) arrived in this place.

The air was full of the spray of the relentlessly pounding, falling water. Tiny rainbows glinted in the air where the hazy light hit the water and suddenly, surreally, Hermione realised she had tears in her eyes.

Regulus, whose hands were feeling his hair to see if it had become damp, turned in surprise to look at her.

" What's wrong?" he asked her.

"Nothing!" she smiled at him as he looked down at her, concern in his grey eyes. "Just….it's so lovely. Makes me miss my friends. I want to tell them about it, and now I can't. Isn't that stupid?"

He shook his head. "'Course not. I think of things I want to tell Sirius all the time. Not all of it's as nice as looking at a beautiful waterfall, mind you , (here, his eyes had a mischievous glint) but even so. I'd like to tell him. But I save it all up, and I suppose, or at least, I hope, that one day I'll see him again."

They stood in comfortable silence, and for the very first time, quite unexpectedly, Hermione felt that somebody truly understood her. It was a nice feeling, she decided.

But the warm feeling did not last long. It was a few minutes before Hermione realised that this was where the map had led them…this was where the road stopped. Regulus might have known what she was thinking, for he was suddenly agitated, and put his hand into his trouser pocket looking, Hermione presumed, for the map.

She was right. He found it, and looked at it privately, with a tense, closed expression and his tongue moistening his lower lip as he eventually held out the worn parchment to her in two long pale fingers. Hermione snatched it from him and her eyes fell on the arrow drawn in a curving downward arc to the next destination. But how to get to it?

"Only one way down, it seems." said Regulus bleakly.

-

"There can't be!"

Hermione bit the words off furiously as if she wanted the place at large to know all about it's injustice. Regulus walked a few yards back from the water and sat down carefully, cross-legged, with his chin in his hands rubbing the ghost of a slight stubble that time could no longer lengthen.

Not for the first time since she had been here, Hermione's hand strayed towards her back pocket where her wand usually was, and finding it of course, absent, she made an angry noise and stalked back over to the water's edge. Regulus watched her.

"There might be some rocks. We can climb down," she called, although this had been the first thing he'd looked for, and he knew there was not. She'd find that out for herself, though.

He waited, fixing his line of vision upon a blade of grass that, if he concentrated long enough and blurred his vision just a bit, was almost the exact same colour as the curtains in the Slytherin common room………..

"There aren't any rocks." came the voice through his thoughts, as he knew it would. Hermione was prodding the grass irritably with her foot. "What are we supposed to do? We can't stay here….we can't just stay here forever, never knowing……"

Regulus looked up at her from under his lashes.

"We aren't _supposed_ to stay here, no. But as I said….one way down."

"What are you suggesting?"

"It's not that deep. And it's not that high. And you can't die twice."

"You're seriously suggesting we go over a waterfall?"

Regulus raised one black eyebrow.

"Not at all." he answered. "I'm suggesting _you_ go. If that's what you want, of course. Take the map, if it pleases you. I'll not need it. I suppose I could go back. Stay here and just wander like I did before…….."

He didn't complete the sentence and it hung in the air like a fog of indistinct saids and unsaids. Hermione listened to the water pour over the cliff into the gully below and thought of going on without him, and felt curiously bereft all of a sudden.

"You want ….you mean…I'm to go on without you? Why?"

Regulus licked at his bottom lip again anxiously .

"I'm not very fond of the water."

"You said we'd be all right."

"I said _you_ would be."

Exasperated, Hermione stalked back over to the edge and peered down.

"We _could_ do it," she said loudly, so he could hear.

He sighed and stood up slowly, walking over to where the water poured down into the valley below.

Hermione slid her hand into his. He looked quickly at her out of the corner of his eye, but then held her hand in both of his, still staring mutely at the natural wonder before them.

"What are you afraid of? Can't you swim?" Hermione asked him tentatively after a moments pause. He gave a brief laugh.

"Yes, of course. I was taught when I was about six years old. Uncle Cygnus had a stream, much like this one in the grounds of the _other_ Black house. The nicer one."

Hermione smiled. "Who taught you? Sirius?" she said, liking to hear these snippets of information on Sirius' childhood. Regulus laughed loudly.

"No…he was useless. Bella taught me to swim, actually. She was about sixteen…that was before she met Lestrange. She was all right then. Nice."

Hermione could not imagine Bellatrix Black Lestrange being 'nice' in any set of circumstances, nor could she picture her, her hair perhaps still thick and glossy as in the old photo in Kreacher's den, but she didn't say anything, and the fine bones of Regulus' face were set in a strange, closed look now.

"I was very good at it actually." he continued unexpectedly "But I don't like it much now. It's just since I was here, really."

He stopped abruptly, but in his mind he was revisiting a cave, a lake glowing, bodies alive and not………deep water and greenish light, dim on the walls…glinting off old gold clutched in a hand oozing darkest red, the colours, he imagined, of betrayal, and perhaps, of courage.

"I would hold your hand," said the quiet female voice next to him.

Regulus closed his eyes and remembered how it felt to find courage where you thought you never could.

He jumped first, and she followed.

-

Hermione felt the bite of the cold water like a blow to the chest, taking her breath away. Chilly water seemed to fill her lungs, her eyes and ears, shutting down her senses as she fell down for what seemed like an age, the water pounding on top of her.

'_In any other cirumstances I would have been killed__'_ she thought. The noise was screeching and rushing through her eardrums, and even as she tried to hold on to Regulus's hand, she felt it being pulled away in the water. She groped for it, hoping against hope, but there was nothing to find, and she kept falling, down and down, and she couldn't breathe…

She abruptly ended her fall. The water fell upon her, plunging her deeper still underwater. She knew she must now be at the bottom of the fall, and flailed her arms tryng to swim out of range of the falling water, but it was no good. She went under, pushed down further by the rushing torrent from above, and there was never going to be anything she could do to prevent it……

_We__'__re going to drown__…_

She kicked out again, remembering vaguely Muggle primary school lessons, and opened her eyes under the water. It was clear and bluish, but there was no sign of anyone else next to her. She forced her head upwards, and tried to swim, pushing with arms that felt like they no longer had bones, but it was too late. She had been holding her breath, but every light in the water, every time she thought she had reached the surface there was just more water,and she had to breathe, she couldn't hold on any longer…….

She opened her mouth, knowing that this was the last time, that the water would rush in and that would be the end. But she was dead already…so how could it be……..

Hermione opened her mouth.

And breathed.

She broke the surface of the water to find herself in a pool some way from the fall. She could still see it crashing a little way off, but it had been a success, she had reached the bottom. She laughed as she came up into the air, her light hair streaming down her back no longer bushy curls, but hanging in wet ringlets around her face.

Exhilarated, she bobbed back under , realising that she could stay under for just as long as she chose now, oh! to have been able to do this when she had been on earth and living! It must have been the first good thing about this place, she thought, turning a somersault underwater. Apart from meeting Regulus…..

-

Regulus.

This sobering thought made her stop. She looked around for the bank and swam carefully over to it, pulling herself up with shaking arms onto warm, dry land. There was no sign of Regulus, the surface of the pool had settled to be smooth and clear, disturbed only by the ripples from the direction if the waterfall.

"Regulus!"

She cried the name she had read so many years ago on a forgotten tapestry with a date of death, a note of rising panic now in her voice as her eyes swept the water for any signs of life. "Regulus!"

She stood up on unsteady legs and ran around the edge of the water, still calling for him, not caring that her clothes were wet and her shoes were squelching horridly on her freezing feet, her hair dripping down her back from her waist. But the water provided her with no answer other than it's incessant waves, running and breaking across the surface, keeping time. She sank down onto the bank and screamed his name with all her might, despair in the pit of her stomach; the one person she could rely on here was gone.

Hermione didn't care how long she sat there on that bank, hot tears seeping through cold, wet fingers. There didn't seem any point in going on now, even though that was what he had wanted her to do, alone.

Maybe, when the dark blotch that heralded the dangerous night came, she would simply stay here, challenge whatever was out there with her own fate and see if she was still conscious in the morning. Maybe she would never move again.

She gave another choking sob and rubbed her face with the back of her hand, looking for one last time out across the water that had claimed her companion, and decided to keep on walking. And then she heard it…

'What're you crying for?' said a familiar voice behind her.

Hermione whipped around.

Regulus Black was standing there, tall, proud, haughty and as handsome as ever, even despite the fact that he was soaked to the skin, his white shirt torn and clinging to his top half under the black scarf that was dripping water on to his boots. His soaked cloak was over his arm and his hair was loose as he gingerly squeezed out the water, and he was smiling at her, the kind of smile that would probably melt even the hardest heart …and in a sudden insight she realised he probably thought she hadn't made it either.

She didn't think about what happened next when she stood up, crying with relief, and running towards him, she threw her arms around his neck.

For a moment, she thought he was crying too, as he shook slightly when she held him. But his eyes were dry when she looked up at last into those clear eyes, and his arms were around her, holding her tight and warming her despite the cold. And in that moment, time might not have mattered at all.

The world seemed to slow and stop for Hermione, she could not longer feel the cooling breeze of approaching night or hear the distant sound of the waterfall. All she could think of was that he was here with her and so close and looking so intensely at her as he touched her cheek with wet fingers that made her shiver, the body she'd almost forgotten could feel like this, awakening under her clothes. They both stood there for a moment, eyes on the other as if reluctant to give up their hand, reluctant to break the spell. _He__'__s going to kiss me _she thought. _He__'__s really going to kiss me._

But he did not kiss her. The sound that came from a small outcrop of gorse bushes just behind them where a small red brick path led, shattered the moment into a thousand pieces, and they pulled quickly apart.

A voice could be heard, high and tinny, floating on the rapidly darkening air, and as foreign in this land of silence as anything possibly could be.

To be continued -

* * *

Quoted: The Fray, 'Look After You'. Comments very welcome. 


	8. Seven : Keeper's Gate

**Disclaimer:**Not mine, no money made. Thanks.

**Author's Note:** **Thank you** to everyone that found the time to leave a comment. I think we have this chapter, and then four more and an epilogue. The new book will probably knock my plotline into a cocked hat, so it will be before then. This chapter is late because the site has obviously decided it hates my story with a passion and so I have only just got it to load it..; ))

**Summary: **

"If we were alive today, we would never have met."

When the Order Of The Phoenix learn of Voldemort's latest plan to use the Veil to experiment with immortality, they embark on a mission to destroy it once and for all. Hermione Granger is nineteen, and in charge of finding the spell that will succeed in this task. But when the mission goes wrong and Hermione is pulled in, who can she possibly turn to for help now she's….well..dead?

**Seven**

**Keeper****'****s Gate**

"_Keep love in your heart. __A life without it is like a sunless garden where the flowers are dead."_

_-_

Hermione clutched Regulus' arm, and they both froze.

'_The cows are in the meadow eating buttercups. Atishoo, atishoo we all jump up__…'_

sang the voice again. The voice of a little girl in a land of dead things gave Hermione such a shock to the system that she swung round, suddenly finding it difficult to breathe. It was almost terrifying, in the gloom, to hear this bodiless voice singing rhymes of a bygone era.

"_Ring o__'__ ring o__'__ roses__…__a pocket full of posies__…"_

Regulus evidently felt similar. Hermione had never seen him draw the sword before, but his reflexes were remarkable; he was pointing it at the source of the noise, grabbing hold of her shoulders protectively with his free arm.

"Who's there?" he called, in a loud voice. Once again, Hermione instinctively reached for a phantom wand as an amputee might try to use a lost limb, but of course, it was not to be found. Her wand was forgotten, however, when the owner of the voice sidled out from behind the largest bush.

It was a small girl, about eight years old. She wore the clothes of Victorian England; a grubby white apron over a long-sleeved dress, long knickerbockers just visible underneath. Her black lace up boots were undone, the laces trailing around thin ankles, and her yellow hair was knotted on top of her head. Her eyes were the most peculiar, though. The dark smudges underneath them were like those Regulus had, but unlike his eyes, the little girl's were dark and hollow. One iris was a pale blue, the other hazel, and she blinked slowly as she stared at Hermione and Regulus as they stared back at her in astonishment.

"_Saw you!__"_shesaid, in the same singsong voice, and giggled into a ragged teddy bear she was holding.

"It's a child, Regulus." Hermione said, in relief. "It's only a child. Put the sword down."

Regulus clearly did not want to put it down. He bit his lower lip in a decidedly doubtful expression, and lowered it slightly.

"Where did you come from?" he asked suspiciously.

The little girl giggled again, but didn't answer him.

"Charis!" came another, deeper voice, making them all jump "Charis! Come back now, it's getting dark!"

The new voice was a male one, gruff and urgent. Charis (they assumed) turned suddenly, and ran back the way she had presumably came in the direction of the new voice.

"What the…" Regulus muttered.

"We'd better follow." Hermione said, firmly, taking his hand that was still gripping her shoulder, and heading towards the red brick path. "This is the path, anyway, and besides, it's getting dark. If there's someone else here, they might know where we can stay tonight."

Regulus just nodded, following Hermione down the path after the little girl. They didn't have to go far, for as they came clear of the tall gorse bushes, their eyes fell on a small cottage. A thick pine forest reared up behind it, dark and forbidding, but preventing any entry was a high fence, so high that the top could not easily be seen. In the centre, there was a large, dark gate with a bar across it.

The cottage itself had a low thatched roof, and a small garden in front edged with a white picket fence. Here, the plants flourished; campanula, honeysuckle and clematis. Sweet William and lavender lined the pathway to the cottage door, and it was in this doorway the old man stood.

"Charis, come in now!" he told the little girl who was swinging the white wooden gate shut and running down the path towards him.

"Grandpapa!" she said, looking up into his frowning face and smiling happily. "Grandpapa, there's peoples! Look!"

The old man looked up as she pointed down the path to where Hermione and Regulus stood, the latter still holding the sword at his side

He looked at them keenly, through narrowed eyes the exact same mismatched colours, Hermione noticed as the little girl who called him grandfather. Eventually, still frowning, but evidently satisfied with their appearance for the moment, he jerked his thumb over his shoulder into the cottage

"You'd best be coming in." he growled "Dark's on it's way. And you can put that sword away, boy, before you take someone's eye out."

Hermione looked at Regulus, whose mouth was still pressed in a thin line looking at the man. After a pause, he slid the sword back into it's leather scabbard, and held out his hand to Hermione. The man stood by the door, still looking gruff and suspicious, but he stood aside to let them pass, Regulus having to duck his head under the low doorway.

Once they were inside, he closed the door, retrieving a stout wooden bar from the floor and hooking it into place across the door. Hermione looked at it, slightly alarmed, and the man must have noticed because he looked back at her and said

"Do that every night, stop looking like a frightened rabbit, girl."

The cottage seemed to be simply one large, dim room. The walls were rough and hewn from the same red brick as the outside. Inset into them were shelves holding a vast assortment of objects not all of which Hermione could name. Things in jars, empty glass bottles of Muggle and Wizard wines, horse brasses, and more. The ceiling was low and painted a dark green, which seemed to make it loom even lower. From it, over a low round table surrounded by mismatched armchairs, hung a huge brass chandelier, it's missing droplets like loose teeth, the others shining fire in the light from the lit hearth across the other side of the room. The table held a pack of cards, a chessboard and an ashtray. In the corner, there stood a rocking chair. Charis sat in it, rocking and quietly crooning her nursery rhymes to her teddy bear over and over, winding a strand of straggly yellow hair around her finger. Other toys, all looking as dilapidated as the teddy were strewn across the floor; a box of spillikins like small bones, a broken china doll; tin soldiers that seemed to have fought many wars if the look of their chipped paint was to be believed.

The man walked around the room and sat down in the largest green armchair. He gestured them to sit down as well. Regulus folded his legs across each other gingerly in the chair across from the old man; she could see his was still poised mistrustfully, and his hand kept straying to his pocket. Hermione sat down in the chair next to Regulus, and the old man produced a small box from his own pocket and took out a cigarette.

He offered the box to Hermione, who wrinkled her nose up at once and refused as politely as she could, but to her surprise, Regulus accepted one, and strode across the room calmly to light it on the fire, leaving a trail of water in his wake from his still dripping cloak.

"Easier this way," said the old man, dryly, and to Hermione's surprise, he drew out a short oak wand, lighting his own cigarette with the end of it, which immediately began to exude green smoke. He pointed it next at the clothes of both of them, which dried immediately. Hermione was relieved.

"Sorry. You forget……." he said. "Perhaps it's time I introduced myself" he said. "I am Silas. This is Keeper's Gate, and I am the Keeper."

"Er……" said Hermione after a short pause. "Er……do you know where we are, sir?"

"I just told you where you are, girl." said the Keeper, gruffly, though he did smile a little, and his voice softened, but only slightly. "I was wondering when some others would turn up. It's been a while…but I wasn't expecting two together."

"Why not? " Hermione asked "Why not two?"

The old man finished smoking and stubbed the end in the green glass ashtray. Regulus still said nothing, just continued to puff on his own, looking watchful as ever, like a cat, mistrustful.

The old man stood, and walked over to a ladder in the corner of the room that Hermione had not noticed at first.

"A moment," he growled, disappearing into the roof. Hermione noticed a peculiar blue light shine through the crack when he opened the hatch in the roof and climbed through it.

He returned a moment later, holding something long and thin, and a piece of worn out parchment, and this time he addressed Regulus directly.

"Took your time getting this far, didn't you, boy."

Regulus looked up sharply.

"What do you know?" he said, rather curtly, but the old man simply chuckled darkly, crumpling the parchment in his hand and holding the other object behind his back.

"Little Regulus Black. The valiant boy who died so aloneTell me: was it worth your trouble?"

Regulus' eyes narrowed , and his face grew even more watchful

"Yes." he said eventually, in a hard and bitter voice that Hermione did not recognise . "Yes, _sir_, it was worth every bit. And now you can tell me how you know so much about me."

"Such spirit!" Hermione found it hard to tell whether it was admiration or mocking in the old man's voice. Perhaps both.

Regulus stood up, as if he'd been insulted, facing down the old man. But the Keeper looked untroubled.

"Sit down, little Black. I know a lot more about you that that, a great deal more, in fact…"- here, his eyes strayed momentarily to rest on Regulus' fingers which were on his pocket again. Regulus seemed to follow his gaze and quickly withdrew them, but did not sit back down. Hermione, who had been watching the scene in front of her, utterly nonplussed, whispered to him, worried about offending the old man, who could, after all, simply throw them back out into the dark.

"Regulus, please."

He glanced at her sideways, and slowly sat back down.

"What do you know about me, then, _Keeper_?" he asked. "And kindly tell me _why_ you know it."

The Keeper smiled slightly.

"I know about all those who pass through here. But only some of them, the very bravest, tend to get this far. You two," he surveyed them briefly again. " Will be looking for the Crossing?"

"The crossing? The Soul Crossing?" Hermione said, excitedly, the prospect of answers at last, irresistible. "What do you know about it? Can we get there? Will I be able to….-"

The Keeper held up a hand for quiet.

"In time, young lady. But first things first. I have something here that now should be returned to it's rightful owner."

He drew his hand out from behind his back to reveal another wand.

"Fourteen inches. Ebony and unicorn hair. Used for only eight short years. Do you recognise it, boy?"

The look on Regulus' face gave the answer his lips could not. The Keeper held out the wand, and Regulus took it at last, with a shaking hand.

"My wand!" he whispered. "It's been so long!"

Silas the Keeper watched, a tiny smile playing around his cracked lips, while Regulus held the wand, still in his outstretched palm, looking as one might look if one held the Koh-I-Noor itself, or some precious object, once thought lost.

"How did you get his wand?" Hermione asked, breaking the silence. Regulus looked up too, evidently having just thought the same thing. The Keeper smiled a little more, slightly twisted and unnerving, but genuine nonetheless;

"They all come to me. I am Keeper of the Gates, but also, I am Keeper of the Wands. And I return them to their owners. When the time is right they come to me…just as you did. They are safe here, until they can be collected. Or not. Depending."

"Will it work?" Regulus' voice cut across the question on the tip of Hermione's tongue.

"Try it." the Keeper invited., with a wave of his hand.

"I don't know what to cast," Regulus muttered. He thought for a moment, and then, flourishing the ebony wand with the familiarity one might attribute to an old friend, he levitated the ashtray off of the low table. He lowered the wand and the shallow receptacle fell onto the polished wooden floor and smashed. Regulus paused for a moment, and then cast a _"__Reparo,__"_watching with an expression about halfway between excitement and satisfaction.

"Wait a moment," Hermione said, trying and failing to keep the annoyance out of her voice. "You do have mine as well, I take it? My wand, I mean?"

The Keeper looked just a little uncomfortable.

"_Your_ wand?" he repeated.

Hermione bit her lip, a little impatient, and a little concerned.

"Yes?" she lifted an enquiring brow at the older man. "My wand. Vine wood. Eleven inches. Also been in use eight years. Do you _have_ it?"

"You aren't a Squib, then young lady?"

Hermione looked furious.

"No. No, I am definitely not a Squib. I was a member of the Order Of The Phoenix. Our mission……..I did a spell…there was a veil, that's all I can remember. A black veil. We were trying to destroy it and I got pulled in. It wasn't supposed to happen ."

The old man narrowed his eyes, and Regulus was listening intently now.

"I have heard of the veil you speak of," he said, not meeting her eyes. "But it is not regarded highly here, in this realm. It has powers, powers that could be dangerous for the lines between one world and another. Cassandra, who lives on the other side of this forest, is a great Seer, or so I understand, it being that we have never met in the physical sense. She says the spirits are afraid of the veil, and they talk of a Dark presence, one who comes to cause evil and discord. Are you part of it?" he demanded, so suddenly, it made Hermione jump.

"No! If you mean……Voldemort," (she felt, rather than saw Regulus flinch next to her) "Then we were working against him."

Hermione frowned, trying hard to remember. The recollection was hard, and hazy, but at last it came back to her.

"He split his soul, he was trying to become immortal. I remember now. He made Horcruxes. We hunted them down and found all but a locket belonging to Slytherin, his ancestor. We knew he had a snake, and himself, so we had to get the locket before we went after them. But before we could find it, we heard he was trying to experiment with the veil. We had to stop him….." she paused suddenly, thoughtful, aware of Regulus suddenly paying attention to her every syllable, one hand on his wand and the other in his pocket. "But I suppose we failed. We couldn't do it."

Silas stood once again, and walked over to a cabinet. He opened it, and took out a shallow stone basin that he held in both hands. Hermione recognised the bowl at once as a Pensieve.

He brought it over to the table, and placed it in front of Hermione. The stone made a loud thump on the wood of the table, and she jumped. Regulus was frowning, and stood up himself, brandishing his wand.

"Now, you just look here…" he began, "There's no need to scare her. Just give her back her wand, and we'll be on our way, thanks. We won't trespass on your," -he looked around, with a great show of theatrical disdain designed to offend - "_Hospitality_…any longer."

Silas growled.

"Put it away, boy. I won't hurt her, and you can even accompany us, how's that?"

"To where?" the other two asked, at the same time. Then Hermione realised what he must mean.

"You want to see my memories?"

The Keeper nodded. "Your boyfriend there can do it. He wants to practise."

Hermione tried not to colour at his reference to Regulus, but she felt his pale, slight hand warm on her arm, gentle and reassuring. _Could get used to this_.

"What do you need to see?" she asked the Keeper nervously.

"I need to see the night you died." he replied.

-

Regulus knelt in front of her as she sat on the edge of the chair. He had the air of a doctor about to perform a complicated surgery upon his own child, and his hands moved from her arms to smooth back the hair at her temples. He looked somehow altered, Hermione thought; more luminous with his wand in his hand, biting down on that full lower lip, concentration apparent as he raised the wand.

"Ok?" he asked her softly, his voice little more than a whisper.

She nodded, and thought hard about the last night…that night of darkness and whispers and spells firing, shouting and yelling and banging…….

A stream of silver later and they all three stood a little way off from the red telephone booth, watching the ten maroon-cloaked Order members descent into the Ministry. Silas, his country attire and baize cloak incongruous in the sudden setting of the richly-decorated Ministry atrium, was beside Regulus and herself as they followed the group in the memory all the way down to the bottom of the stairs.

"Who's the redhead?" asked Regulus, eyes on her previous self giving Ron a hug as they tried the three doors and eventually found the Death room.

"That's just Ron," she whispered, as if the party in front might possibly hear them, although she knew that was impossible.

"Just Ron." Regulus repeated, lifting one eyebrow. "Just Ron seems to like you, doesn't he?" His lip curled.

"He's been my friend for eight years," Hermione said, shortly. To Silas, she said "This is where I have to do the spell……"

She tailed off as she saw herself approach the veil. Regulus was staring at it, transfixed; she had told him how his brother had died. The other Order members had their backs to her and were covering the doors, all except Ron, who stood with his hand on her shoulder looking fearful and white. She noticed Regulus shift his gaze slightly, eyes narrowed.

Her own voice begin the incantation, and they watched as the mortar of the antiquated structure began to drip and ooze, and the wind begin, concentrated around the dais where the stone arch stood. She saw herself struggle to keep her footing, and she saw when the doors crashed open and the four Death Eaters ran into the room and started shooting green and red light in all directions. She thought of Regulus in those robes, and felt suddenly, a little tearful, when she realised she could imagine it quite well.

The noise really was as loud as she remembered at the time. The three of them saw her being dragged closer to the veil. Ron was shouting, his voice rising to a scream as the pull of the veil became stronger. Hermione saw her cloak torn off, the gold phoenix in tatters on the sleeve, saw red and blue light shimmering and bouncing off the walls, a muted whirl of colour in the heart of the veil wrenching and ripping. She saw her own wand drop from her hand, something she hadn't been aware of at the time. Ron's hand flew out to catch hers, and then all of a sudden, they were in darkness and being flung sharply upwards and out of the pensieve.

Hermione thought there would be more to see, but even so, she was almost glad to feel the solid seat of the armchair in the Keeper's cottage. This did not stop the tears from coming. She felt arms hold her tightly, smelt the familiar scent of hair that was not red, but as black and smooth as the night outside the curtained windows of the cottage, and after a moment, she stopped shaking.

"You still haven't given me back my wand," she blurted to the Keeper, who sat watching them carefully, his fingers steepled under his chin. "Where is it?"

"Young lady…" the Keeper sighed. "Your wand…is _there_." he pointed with his index finger into the Pensieve.

"What do you mean?"

"It confirmed my suspicions. If you are a witch, and now I have no doubt, indeed…..then this memory is incomplete."

"Incomplete?"

"Unfinished, unsealed……inconclusive." he sounded every syllable in this last word out like drops of water falling on hot metal.

"You're telling me you haven't got my wand……because I didn't _die_ properly?" she said eventually, her expression growing as she got the sentence out, as if hearing the words uttered aloud only added to her incredulity.

Silas lit up another cigarette, puffing green smoke slowly to make rings around the chandelier above them.

"I've got nothing on you." the Keeper said flatly."You were not meant to come over."

"But…my wand!" Hermione protested uselessly.

The Keeper sighed, looking slightly irritated.

"Your wand, young lady, lies on the floor of the Department Of Mysteries. In the land of the Living. I cannot reach it, and neither can you. There is no mortal here, there is no flesh and blood, no mortal coil, there is no beginning nor end to oneself…… only one's soul. Regulus here knows that…don't you?"

The old man said turning suddenly to look at Regulus, who was silent. The Keeper turned his odd eyes back to Hermione.

"But you…you are not one amongst us. You don't live as we must, inside this hollow neither here nor there. You are not meant to be here now. It is not your time. You must find the only way back from here."

"The way back? But how do I…"

"That is for tomorrow, young lady. Tonight you must stay here and rest your mind. It is only the very sharpest and courageous of souls who make it to the Soul Crossing. Tomorrow you set out. For now, let us enjoy the fire and………the company. It's rather rare, in my line of work, you see."

-

The smoke hung in a haze above the round oak table. Regulus and Silas were playing cards, and she was passing the time curled up in the large armchair with a crocheted rug over her legs. Regulus had cast a spell to repair and clean her clothes and herself, and she was feeling better now the tangles and the tearstains had been erased. Her hair in particular felt lovely, and Regulus apparently thought so too, having earlier reached across the back of her chair and fingered a thick strand of it, as if he was curious about its texture.

The two men muttered in low voices over the table. It seemed Regulus was much the better player, winning two games outright before the Keeper had won the third, but Hermione couldn't help feeling that Regulus had let him win. Silas got rather gruffer as the games went on; perhaps he had expected the younger man to be easy to beat. Hermione did not dislike Silas, but couldn't help feeling satisfied that Regulus could embarrass him at poker. She had attempted to converse with Charis, who still sat rocking back and forth in the rocking chair, teddy bear still staring with it's one glassy eye at nothing in particular, but the conversation seemed very limited, mostly a high-pitched, muttered line from whatever nursery rhyme the child happened to be considering at that moment. Hermione wondered how Charis had died.

She saw Regulus look up at her, but she turned her head away, away from Charis rocking endlessly in the chair singing 'Hey Diddle Diddle," under her breath and from the sad broken toys on the floor. She sat in her armchair and dozed until she saw the sky begin to lighten behind the Hessian curtains.

"Checkmate." said Regulus, from his armchair.

Hermione smiled behind her hand, remembering another chess game a long time ago.

-

Quoted: Oscar Wilde

Comments most welcome.


	9. Eight : The Heart Of A Lion

**Disclaimer:**Not mine, no money made. Thanks.

**Author's Note:** Much gratitude to everyone following this tale...Yvonnia, Pink Tribe Chick,Nynaeve80, Fallon Nicole and sharrahenley, thank you so much for the positive comments! I hope you continue to enjoy.

**Summary: **

"If we were alive today, we would never have met."

When the Order Of The Phoenix learn of Voldemort's latest plan to use the Veil to experiment with immortality, they embark on a mission to destroy it once and for all. Hermione Granger is nineteen, and in charge of finding the spell that will succeed in this task. But when the mission goes wrong and Hermione is pulled in, who can she possibly turn to for help now she's….well..dead?

**Eight**

**The Heart Of A Lion**

"_Even in the desolate wilderness, stars can still shine"_

_-_

The Keeper seemed to have forgotten his annoyance by the time they stood at the cottage door to leave.

"What do I do now?" Hermione asked the old man.

"The Crossing lies beyond the forest." he replied. "You," -he turned to Regulus- "Must see that she reaches it. There is much to be done in the world of the Living, still so much to be done. Take her back, and when you do, you will return the key I will give you to me here. Don't forget that…….the key works for only one soul."

Regulus nodded silently.

He took a small silver key from his pocket and placed it in Regulus' outstretched hand.

"Then go," Silas pointed a gnarled finger into the deep forest behind the cottage. "Stay on the path. Stay out of the dark as much as you can, find shelter as you need it. At the end of the forest you will find Cassandra's house. She will give you shelter and point you towards the gate that can be opened with the silver key. And remember, there is only one." he said. "To lose the key, you would also lose her. And…….good luck." The Keeper gave his unnerving crooked grin, and Hermione watched as Regulus' long fingers closed upon the little silver key.

"Shouldn't I keep it?" she asked, automatically, used to being in charge of Harry and Ron. Regulus tilted an eyebrow and smiled thinly.

"I have the wand."

Hermione was surprised herself at how upset she felt, being the one that couldn't do magic. She thanked the Keeper for his hospitality and his advice, and walked purposefully away from the two men, who seemed to have moved from the earlier hostility to an arrangement of grudging respect. She walked towards the high gates at the entrance to the black forest, too far away to hear the last thing the Keeper said to Regulus before he caught her up and unlocked the gates.

"You should tell her," the old man said, not meeting Regulus' eyes. "What you're hiding there, in your pocket."

-

The forest was darker, a lot darker, that Hermione had anticipated, and without a wand , they might never have been able to see their way throught the dense trees, around the boggy swamps and the stagnant pools of discoloured water. Staying on the path was difficult, for often the path was obstructed, necessitating a long detour and then a search for the path they had been forced to leave.

"What did the Keeper say to you?" Hermione asked as they trudged through endless undergrowth. "That he didn't want me to hear?"

Regulus rubbed his cheek with his bloody sleeve.

"He didn't say anything important." he answered, shortly.

Hermione wasn't sure that he was telling the truth, but the more pressing concern was finding a way through the forest. It was true that she was still sore about not having her wand , but with this, was the glimmer of hope that she would be able to find her way back.

The Keeper had said her memory of dying had been incomplete. She wondered if this had been why she'd wanted things like sleep and food at first, and supposed it must have been, because Regulus had never seemed to want to do either. At first it had been unnerving, but after a while it was wonderfully convenient, if she was honest, to never need to stop for those things. It would certainly be very helpful for studying.

She wondered if, when she arrived home, Harry and Ron would have already found the locket and defeated Voldemort. She tried not to think about the battle going the other way, returning to find them both dead and Voldemort ruling the Wizarding world. Returning to find her own gravestone would be bizarre. She wondered what her parents would say when their dead daughter walked in through the door. What would Harry have told them? How long had she been gone? Would it be possible to get home at all?

"There's no sense in worrying," said Regulus next to her, and Hermione realised that she'd been biting her lips, gripping his hand a little harder than strictly necessary. He'd held her hand to help her over a particularly boggy patch of ground, but hadn't let it go. She wondered if he'd been embarrassed when the Keeper had called him 'your boyfriend', but he didn't seem to mind. Sirius had never been embarrassed by anything, she recalled, realising, as she thought about Sirius the oddity of the situation. It was so strange to think that, although she had known Sirius first at the age of thirty three, Regulus had been in the year below. She'd worked that out from the tapestry, Sirius told them he was born in 1959. She calculated mentally, and laughed out loud.

"What?" Regulus enquired.

"I was just trying to work out how old we both would have been if we'd been around at the same time." she said.

"And?"

"Well, I'm nineteen now, so that would make you thirty eight."

"I don't feel thirty eight," he said dryly

"You don't look thirty eight."

Regulus smirked.

"Would you still like me if I did?"

"Who says I like you now?" Hermione smirked at him back and held his hand a little tighter.

-

"Tell me about the Horcruxes."he asked, satisfied with the slight pressure on his hand, the wordless answer to his question.

"What do you want to know?"

"How did _you_ know about them, for a start? He, the Dark Lord, thought only he knew."

"Harry was told by Professor Dumbledore. He was your headmaster, wasn't he? Sirius said he was."

"Yes."

"He told Harry about them, the year after Sirius died. He'd been trying to trace them himself. Sometimes I wonder if he didn't know he would die soon, though, because he chose that year to tell Harry about them. He, Harry, went to find one of them."

"So he had more than one," said Regulus, very quietly, almost to himself.

"Dumbledore thought six, and we think he's right." Hermione answered, not noticing the odd expression ghost across Regulus' fine features at the mention of this. "They, Harry and the Headmaster, thought they had the locket, but it was a fake. Somebody else had got there before them."

Regulus drew in a breath, and stopped, as if he was about to say something, but a slight movement between the trees ahead of them halted further discussion.

He put out his arm, preventing Hermione from going any further.

"What was that?" she asked, whispering now. Regulus kept his right arm across Hermione, and drew his wand with his left.

"Don't know," he said, in a low voice. " I asked the Keeper if anything was in the forest, and he said he didn't know. He's never been through it, he says. Reckons people go in and never come out, so he sends letters with his Patronus."

Hermione pushed his arm away.

"He said that, and you never told me?"

"You want to turn around and stay here forever?"

"No, of course I don't, but….."

"Then come on. The quicker the better, I think, don't you?"

The journey through the forest seemed to be taking an awfully long time. Hermione kept glancing nervously upwards for the dark in the sky, but the pine trees were so dense and close-set that it was hard to see anything above them. Regulus seemed agitated, and kept looking around and behind them, rather like Mad Eye Moody, although, she reasoned, perhaps Regulus wouldn't go so far as to behave this way ordinarily, as Moody would do, according to Tonks, in shops and on beach holidays.

They had reached a particularly dense part of the forest. It was now difficult to even see the path, it was so overgrown and damp in this spot, and the forest was so dark. Regulus seemed to remember his wand at last; Hermione had quite forgotten herself that one of them could now use magic, and she breathed a sigh of relief. But the relief was only short-lived, as when he lit the wand, and they looked downwards, they realised they were no longer standing on the path, but on dry, hard earth. They retraced their steps for a few minutes, but this did not yield any success, and only left Hermione with the horrible, lurching sensation that they were getting more and more lost. If only it wasn't so dark; the lumos charm barely worked here, giving only enough light to see a little way ahead.

A slight movement between the trees to the left made Regulus draw in his breath.

"Is something wrong?" Hermione whispered loudly.

"I'm not sure yet," He sounded very worried, and this unnerved Hermione.

"The Keeper told us not to lose the path, and now I've put you in danger."

"I lost the path too, Regulus. Stop trying to blame yourself just to be chivalrous."

He looked at her seriously.

"Maybe it's about time I blamed myself for a few things." he said shortly. "The Keeper thinks you can get back. I was supposed to be looking after you."

"Do you think I can?"

" I hope you can, I suppose." he replied, though he sounded far from happy about it.

They tried to find their bearings, but the forest just seemed to go on and on, the trees now so close together that they had to walk in single file through them, Regulus having to stoop and the lowest branches catching on Hermione's hair as she tried to pass. Regulus held his wand aloft. They couldn't see much.

The trees here seemed to make a strange sound. Hermione had begun to notice it when the forest got thicker, and the light was all but excluded. She kept looking down, hoping to see the path and cursing them for being so stupid, but this forest seemed to have the curious quality of addling ones mind, preventing any kind of clear thought. The further they walked, the more she felt she couldn't think clearly , and it scared her.

"How far, d'you think, to the other side of the forest?" she asked Regulus, who did not talk much as a rule (another disparity between him and his older brother, Hermione noted) but now was worryingly silent, as if he was frightened. Perhaps he was. It was not a nice thought. Regulus did not seem the sort of person to be easily frightened. Sirius hadn't been either.

"I…I'm not sure.." he began, hesitantly. "Hermione….I think we've gone the wrong way."

He raised a stiff hand out in front of him, indicating something through the trees up ahead. It was then that Hermione caught a cloying stench from that same direction. She followed his gesture and what she saw made fear rise, sour in her throat.

"Oh my god………" was all she could manage.

-

In a clearing, up ahead, was a building. Like a ruined castle keep, it stood precariously by itself in amongst the dense pines. The crumbling walls were fashioned from stone. It shone wetly, black in the gloom, and one side of the castle was almost entirely missing. Moss crept up the slimy walls from the ground up, daubing the stone with a dirty dark green, but this was by far not the most horrifying thing about the place.

In a seething mass all around the ruin were the same dark shadows of spirits that had attacked Hermione the night she and Regulus had first met and he'd rescued her.

They swept across the ground in front, some corporeal, some no more than smoke, a wispy suggestion of potential evil.. But there were so many of them, the ground and air writhing; alive with darkness.

_This must be where they live. Where they breed….. _Hermione thought in terror. _And we've walked straight into it._

"Get back," Regulus said sharply, putting out his arm to stop her going any further, and extinguishing the wand light. "Get back, and we'll try and get away before they sense us here. We might be able to get enough of a start."

"But it's the day," Hermione whispered. "How can they be active now? I thought you said…."

"It's dark in here, right? They need darkness, it doesn't matter how they get it. That's why fire keeps them away. If we can get out of the forest, we'll make it, they won't follow unless it's dark. Come -" He found her hand and tugged her away. "Quickly-"

"I can't see, Regulus……."

"Hold on to me, my eyes are used to the dark…."

Hermione gripped blindly to his arm, still surprised at how warm he was for somebody who was supposed to be dead, but this place didn't seem to follow any particular traditional rules on that state, at least, not any she's been aware of.

Afraid to run for the noise it would make, they had only made it a few yards away from the opening in the trees when Hermione suddenly tripped over a protruding low branch and fell.The branch snapped with an almighty echoing crack.

In any other circumstances, the impact would have broken her ankle. In these circumstances, the pain was brief and intense, so she screamed, but it was soon over in the sheer horror of what she had done.

The Malevolents in the clearing seemed to surge as one towards them when they heard the noise and registered the presence of something other than themselves in the forest. They moved as one, an undulating mass of darkness, fathomless black, emptiness and evil looking out through slits of amber-red.

Regulus held her tightly around the waist. She heard him draw in breath sharply, and draw his wand back, throwing a stream of fire at the mass of Malevolents coming towards them. He pulled her up, moving faster even than the black mass advancing on them..

"Are you all right?"

She nodded.

"Can you run?" Abruptly.

"Yes, I -"

"Keep in front of me, then. Let me fight them. Stay ahead. Go!"

"I'm sorry Regulus….." she began.

"We all fuck up sometimes." he laughed briefly, bitterly "We'll be ok. Just stay in front."

Perhaps it was the uncharacteristic use of the profanity that jerked her into action, but she began to run, trying desperately to find the way by looking up beween the trees. It was no good, so she had to work by instinct, and found herself heading off down a path they hadn't seen before, but a path, nonetheless. She glanced behind her to see if Regulus was following. He wasn't as close behind her as she would have liked, and he was stopping every few paces to throw more fire at the creatures pursuing them through the darkness of the forest. Hermione could hear the terribly familiar whispering and mocking laughter as he cast yet another charm.

This one made the forest floor catch, the dry bracken going up and would hold them, Hermione thought, for a minute perhaps at most. They needed to find a place that it was light, but a minute wasn't enough.

Blind and frightened, she ran back to Regulus, who was now not running at all, doubled over with the effort of a difficult charm cast over and over. Bizarrely, he laughed, his eyes unfocused.

"He said I wanted to practice," he mumbled. "Bloody hell…"

The other laughter got louder too, behind the rapidly falling curtain of fire that was their only protection from their pursuers, bent on increasing their own resources of power by leaving the two of them empty soulless shells.

But they'd got this far…..

"Quick, Regulus," Hermione urged. "We've still got time, we've got a chance…"

"No," he shook his head. "There's too many of them. I can't hold them off with the fire charms any more. The ones here have some kind of resistance, they aren't affected this close to their home…..you should run, Hermione. You should run."

"And leave you, you mean?"

"Yeah. Leave me. It's not you they're after."

It's the dark that she couldn't stand. It crawled into her bones.She couldn't bear the thought of him being taken, having his soul stolen away leaving nothing, and she couldn't bear to hear him scream. Not now. Not after all this….

"I'm not leaving you." Stubborn, unyielding.

Listen, you've got to go, run! Now! Don't worry about me, leave me. Just get yourself out, go back and _live _and be happy. Take the key, take it now…."

He took the small silver key shakily from his pocket and pressed it into her hand, closing her fingers clumsily over it, and this scared her more than anything; Regulus was anything but clumsy and now she really knew he believed what he said, he wasn't going to make it out of this.

"Regulus……please, no…." she whispered as her voice cracked under the weight of the words

"Take the key Hermione. Don't make me give up my soul for nothing. I felt as if I did that for someone else, when I was alive.One of us has got to get away, and I've decided it's going to be you. I had my chance years ago, when I was alive. You can make something of yourself."

"How could you be a Slytherin? " she asked him, tears wanting to come, but not doing so.

"I was a Slytherin because I asked to be." he answered. "Choices, you see. And here's another one. Go….and Hermione?"

"What?" came the shaking reply.

"Come here for just a moment," he said softly. She walked towards him, and in those last moments, he pulled her close up against him, wrapping his arms around her and pressed his lips hard on hers. The kiss was fierce and ungentle, and over all too soon.

"I wanted to do that now, in case I never got another chance." he said. "Now run. Please. Just run."

Hesitating, she turned and staggered a few steps, looking back at Regulus. He had his wand raised up ready to cast as they came at him again. He stood now, with a great effort, tall and proud, and Hermione hoped that was the way he had died, though she'd never asked him about it, and looking back, she wondered why. Perhaps it was that, by now, so many had died under that green light of Voldemort's wand that she could scarcely imagine another way. Now she would never know.

She heard the incantation yelled and saw the fire streak again from Regulus' wand, the Malevolents attacking, now over the barrier of fire, falling back, and then regrouping for another attack. Just one touch from them, she thought. One touch, and I lose him.

'_The valiant boy who died so alone…'_

The cracked, sinister voice of the Keeper revisited her mind and she knew she wasn't going to run. Wasn't going to let him go alone.

A clump of thorny yellow gorse grew stunted at the foot of one of the larger pines, and it was here Hermione managed to conceal herself, waiting for a chance, any chance, to help Regulus. But she hadn't been there long, parting the branches with bloodied fingers to watch and wait, when she heard him cry out, a low noise of agony, and her heart filled with dread. She didn't want to see this, but she had to watch, she couldn't look away.

Hermione watched in horror as the creatures launched another attack and Regulus' wand was flung out of his hand in a wide arc, landing close to where she crouched hidden. Regulus himself had hit the ground and was trying to get to his feet and failing. As the creatures advanced on him he covered his face with his hands.

He did not scream.

And Hermione made a decision.

All in one movement, it seemed, she had flung herself out from behind the bush and closed her hand on the handle of Regulus' fallen wand. She thought hard, of Harry and Ron and seeing her parents again, and she thought of the boy lying collapsed on the ground who had been prepared to give himself up to let her see them again. ..

It was a chance. Maybe.

"Expecto patronum!" she shrieked.

It happened in a moment. The otter, her otter, sprang forth from Regulus' ebony wand. Not as distinct as would have been achieved with her own, but the Malevolents fell back, fearful at the sight of the Patronus. The silvery otter advanced on them just as they had upon Regulus, and they surged back towards the ruined castle, their whispers urgent and afraid. Hermione followed bravely, Regulus' wand raised in her hand, to where he lay on the forest floor and dragged him to his feet.

"Regulus…" she said, her voice infused with panic; they were not safe yet. "Regulus, can you stand?"

"Thought I told you… to run."

"I'm not running unless you run too."

The look lasted just a fraction of a second, but all was there, and all was said. He nodded.

She handed back his wand.

"What's your Patronus? Quick, cast it after mine!"

Regulus hesitated .

"I haven't ever managed one, not yet." His face was ashen and his voice wavered.

Hermione bit her lip.

"Well, try! " she urged. "It's not my wand, it won't drive them off for long enough for us to get out of this place. It has to be you. Think about being happy!"

"I don't…."

"Think! Please, it's our only chance"

He closed his eyes as the Malevolents circled Hermione's otter, and it began to fade into vapour, and a slow smile began to spread across his face. Hermione didn't have time to wonder what memory he was calling to mind, for in the next moment , there was a flash of silver light, a rushing noise. She shut her eyes against the bright light, and heard a triumphant bark of laughter, as a warm hand grabbed hold of her own.

"I did it," he gasped.

Hermione opened her eyes. A magnificent silver lion, teeth bared and mane flowing, charged through the trees into the dark seething mass of wicked spirits. They screeched, a high, ear-splitting noise, swooping back, cowering into the darkness of the crumbling ruin. The lion threw its head back, shook it's regal mane and roared, shaking the forest floor as the remaining spirits disintegrated into nothing but vapour and smoke in the space that they had occupied.

-

Light was filtering down through the trees. Hermione and Regulus walked in silence, the silver lion still circling by Regulus' side, not fading as long as he held his wand high; sometimes gambolling ahead of the two of them, sometimes pacing behind, but always there, protecting them.

The edge of the forest awaited, glowing in the half-light of the first real evening Hermione had seen since she had arrived in this place.

And it was beautiful. Relief made it all the more so; made her want to collapse onto the forest floor, hold on to the man beside her and let tears come at last. But Regulus was weak from his fight, and although he was making great efforts to hide this and remain strong, he was even paler than usual, the shadowed smudges under his eyes more pronounced and his steps sometimes faltered.

"Regulus…" she started to say, looking at him with concern in her eyes, but he waved it away.

"M'fine…" he mumbled.

"If we can't find the cottage," Hermione said decisively "Then I'm building a fire. Now. The Keeper should have told us what was in the forest," she continued. "I can't imagine why he never did."

Regulus looked up.

"The Keeper didn't know, I suspect," he said, faintly. "I told you, he said he'd never been in here."

"Still," Hermione looked about her. "Here we are."

She surveyed the landscape. The black forest stretched on behind them, treacherous and foreboding. The lane they were on, however, was actually a real lane, lined with lush grass and flowers, larkspur and hollyhocks and foxgloves bloomed in the hedgerows and the grass was a healthy green, turning golden in the evening light.

As they walked, the dust kicked up from the grit on the lane and Hermione was remeinded of family holidays and long walks in Greece; endless evenings, long and full of beauty. How she missed them, but there again, here was something too, that before she'd never known.

Regulus arm tightened around her as they walked together in silence. She waited patiently when he had to stop for a moment and he tried not to stop for too long.

When the darkness appeared in the sky, thet had only just spotted the outline of the house ahead of them.

As they drew closer, it appeared not to be the house they were looking for, and Hermione felt a faint clutch of panic in her chest. The Keeper had not said that it was a burnt wreck of a cottage, but this was what stood in front of them.

Most of the ceiling had fallen in, the glass in the window frames smashed. The grass in front of the cottage and most of the white-painted picket fence had been torched as well.

Curiously, though, the front door and the knocker were shining, bright and intact despite the blackened bricks and picture of devastation that surrounded them. Hermione eyed them suspiciously.

"Doesn't look like the place," Regulus was saying. "We'll have to….(he gasped a little ) have to camp. There's no more time."

But Hermione continued to look suspiciously at the house.

"Give me the map." she said eventually.

Regulus handed her the dirty, worn piece of parchment and she looked at it, looking back at the ruined cottage in front of them.

"The map says this is it. _Burnt_ Cottage. That's what it says." she muttered slowly.

"I wonder…"

And to Regulus' utter surprise, she marched straight up the winding, debris strewn path and took the polished brass knocker in her hand, banging it down twice, hard, on the glossy red paint of the door.

Regulus watched from the other end of the path, idly holding his wand in one hand, and looking a little unsure as to what on Earth Hermione was doing.

There was a long pause in which he was about to tell her it was no good, that the place was abandoned and to come on before it got dark and dangerous.

But before he could open his mouth to say it, the painted door flew open with a clatter, and a woman stared out at them.

* * *

**_Quoted: Aoi Jiyuu Shoroi Nozomi_**

_**Next time : More memories, thieving old women and...shirtless older brothers. Among other things. **_

_**Comments welcome!**_


	10. Nine : A Fragment Of Soul

**Disclaimer:**Not mine, no money made. Thanks.

**Author's Note** Wow...lots of comments on that last chapter! Thanks to everyone...Mizz Moony, sorry for the scare, but it had to be done. Poor Reggie, his torment is great.If you flame me, though, you will recieve a long fanfic written just for you, shipping Reggie and Filch. Galleon to Galleon - Thank you!, Erin - Yeh'll have to see!, Pink Tribe Chick - More as requested! Yvonnia - Sorry to be scarey! Fallon Nicole - Thank you, hope this one's up to scratch. - d-26 - glad you are [possibly converted... Beautiful Enigma - I am so glad you liked so far, I agree it is great to explore the possibilities! xLazertx - Thanks, updated! allesrosa - Shirtless Sirius just for you...Seebear - Thank you...see if you like Cassandra more than Hermione does!

**Summary: **

"If we were alive today, we would never have met."

When the Order Of The Phoenix learn of Voldemort's latest plan to use the Veil to experiment with immortality, they embark on a mission to destroy it once and for all. Hermione Granger is nineteen, and in charge of finding the spell that will succeed in this task. But when the mission goes wrong and Hermione is pulled in, who can she possibly turn to for help now she's….well..dead?

**Nine**

**A Fragment Of Soul**

_"Every man should have a secret..."_

_-_

Hermione was momentarily speechless. The woman standing in front of her was taller than she was, and thin, so thin that her large head and great spectacles gave her the look of an enormous ant. She stared at Hermione for a moment, but it was when her gaze drifted over Hermione's shoulder to rest on Regulus, who was propping himself up on the blackened gatepost, that she gave a wide, gummy smile, showing small, brownish teeth and gestured to him.

"My dear young people," she said, her voice wavery and deep. "My dears……the Keeper sent his Patronus ahead to warn me of your arrival. Of course , I did not require it…I knew already that you would come to me."

Hermione was reminded sharply of another so-called Seer in the world she had left behind. She was sure she had read about a Cassandra Trelawney, great-grandmother of her one-time Divination mistress. This had to be her.

Hermione suppressed a snort.

"The Keeper said you'd let us stay the night. And help us find the Crossing." Hermione said, trying to sound polite but it came out rather curt. Cassandra looked momentarily annoyed , then rearranged her features back into the smile.

"Come in, my dears, come in." she said, gesturing more to Regulus than to Hermione, Hermione noticed.

Hermione waited until Regulus had joined her on the threshold of this strange cottage before they crossed it.

Inside the cottage was very different to the outside. All home comforts, Hermione thought, wryly, as she looked around. The place reeked of incense, so cloying and thick that Hermione almost took a step back when she first encountered the strong perfume. She wanted to cover her nose with her hand, breathe through her fingers and try to dilute the too-sweet, headachey aroma, but unfortunately, she could not do this without Cassandra noticing, and she thought it best to try not to offend the woman, even if she already felt the familiar pangs of irritation beginning saved over from her …Hermione thought back……great great granddaughter.

-

There was something deeply disconcerting about Cassandra's cottage. It was not the outside appearance, so much, in this place she had become almost accustomed to things not being what they appeared at first to be, but apart from the heat and the overpowering scent, the place seemed to possess a great deal more echo than one would expect from such a small room. Hermione shifted uncomfortably from one foot to the other, noticing that Regulus also appeared uneasy, looking about him hawkishly and peering sharply into every corner, at every one of the strange, gimcrack objects that adorned the dusty shelves and cabinets.

"It's quite all right, my dears," Cassandra intoned, interrupting their thoughts as she moved around the room,gathering up what seemed to be a bunch of old weeds and throwing them on the fire that responded by belching out even more copious clouds of yellow smoke."I know everything, everything."

Hermione doubted this severely, wanted to groan loudly and rudely at the familiar put-on ethereal tone, but instaed she just asked:

"_What_ do you know?"

Cassandra gave an indulgent smile, the sort one might give to a curious child, Hermione thought, the night before Christmas. She ushered them closer to the fire, and they saw that on the fire was a large kettle, the same bright-painted red as the front door. Next to the fire was the predictable stack of teacups, but the 'tea' Cassandra handed to Regulus was not a liquid, but a gas.

"You are weak, my dear," she said. "Take this."

Regulus hesitated, his arms still closed over his chest, but the Seer woman approached him, putting her bony arm around him, and eyeing him in the most unnerving manner.

Regulus looked most uncomfortable with this arrangement, and extracted himself from her grip uncomfortably, and so obviously, Hermione thought, looking on, that she was sure the woman would be offended. Instead, however, Cassandra stepped back almost at once, hands clasped, and with a curious, satisfied smile on her face where it had not been before.

Regulus drank, or rather, inhaled, the 'tea' Cassandra had given him, and although it looked strange, he sighed, a sound of relief more than anything, and stood a little straighter, when he had finished.

-

The surreal sunset outside was giving way to dark fast outside.

" Is it…..er….is it all right if we stay here for the night?" Hermione asked tentatively, not feeling at all happy with the prospect of spending the entire night in the company of this woman but at the same time, seeing little choice in the matter. To her surprise, Cassandra looked scandalized, though, as if she had suggested something terrible.

"My dear!" she exclaimed. "No, no, no, my dear!"

"I'm sorry…" Hermione began, noticing Regulus toying with his wand again out of the corner of her eye.

"My dear…." Cassandra began again. " When this Realm is in darkness, it is the best time to study the _soul_." she said, her voice becoming even more silvery and Hermione thought, ridiculous.

"That is what I do, you understand, my dear young people, why I chose not to go on as most do, but to stay here and _plumb_ the mysteries of the human _psyche_."

"Meaning _what_, exactly?" Regulus spoke now, his voice carefully measured, but Hermione could tell he was just as puzzled as she was, if not more so.

Cassandra did not answer at once. She ushered the two of them to the door, where outside the dark was falling rapidly, and opened a small cabinet. After a moment of rummaging amongst the various rubbish they could see inside, she withdrew a large rusty key, and slammed the cabinet shut with a snap, crossing the room to take a hairy, turqouise cloak from a nail and flinging it theatrically about her bony shoulders.

"What…what are you doing?" asked Hermione.

"I must meditate tonight." Cassandra said, peering at Hermione through her huge spectacles. "Company clouds my inner eye, and tonight there is much to be…oh! " she stopped speaking abruptly, as if she had been about to say something that she should not have. Then she held out the key to Regulus, who took it, dangling it between his thumb and long forefinger, raising an eyebrow.

"And this is?" he began…

"They key, my dear." Cassandra told him, with significance they both missed the meaning of.

"I can see that," Regulus said. "But why do I need this?"

"You need it, my dear boy, for somewhere to stay the night. The other cottage is not far, though it has been a long time…" Here she trailed off. "My sister's home, you see, but one day she decided she wanted to go on, and left me here. I always said that she never possessed the gifts that I do, but in any case…hurry on before _dark_, my dear, and I shall see you in the morning."

They were standing on the path, now, looking back at the weird, charred exterior of the house. Hermione looked at the darkening sky and looked back at Cassandra, who simply smiled, with a disturbing air of satisfaction, but Hermione could not tell what could possibly have made the old woman suddenly so smug.

She frowned, and looked at Regulus as Cassandra bade them goodbye and opened the gate and began to walk down the path they themselves had come here on. Hermione knew what lay at the end of that path. She turned to Regulus in alarm.

"Regulus," she said, urgently. "It's getting dark…she'll…shouldn't we tell her about..?"

Regulus was just staring at the woman in disbelief, so it was up to Hermione to catch her up.

"You can't….there's…" she began, but Cassandra cut her off mid-sentence, her eyes large and dewy and full of sympathy.

"I do not fear the forest, my dear. I feel sure that the spirits will have reverence for such an extraordinary soul, if you'll forgive me, as myself."

"But it's dangerous!" Hermione protested stubbornly, looking at the older woman in horror.

Cassandra's benevolent smile did not falter, though. She laid a claw-like hand on Hermione's shoulder.

"It may well be treacherous," she intoned mistily, "For those such as _yourself_, who I can clearly see do not possess the Sight. But for myself……." she smiled, clutching the violently coloured cloak about her, and with a small wave, she hurried away.

Hermione was left standing speechless on the path. Regulus was lounging on the gatepost, smirking.

"Don't laugh! " Hermione cried. " Should we go after her?"

"Can't see why." Regulus said. It's almost dark. She seems very sure she knows what she's doing in any case. Not really our problem, is it?"

"Oh, a very Slytherin attitude!"

"A sensible one, though. Stop feeling so responsible for everything. She must know what's in there in any case. And if she thinks she can handle it for the sake of her bloody _meditation _, (he said the word with heavy sarcasm, and even through her annoyance, Hermione couldn't help but smile a little) then so be it."

It seemed like the only thing to do was to find the other place before it got dark. They happened upon it only a short while later.

It was a short, squat building, whitewashed on the outside and with a view of the forest that it overlooked. Hermione was still wondering, agitated at the thought of Cassandra walking through there at night alone.

Regulus finally succeeded in turning the brass key in the rusty lock and with some difficulty, shoved the door open with his shoulder, leaving a dirty mark on his cloak.

Hermione brushed at his shoulder and began to inspect then piles of rubbish.

"This place is just full, utterly full…of junk." she exclaimed, and then jumped as she felt a movement snaking around her legs, something with fur.

"What the…."

Regulus laughed. "It's only her cat." he said, laughing, and picking up the scrawny, white creature. "It followed us here, seems the creature's got more sense than it's mistress."

"A cat…" Hermione repeated, and then laughed herself. The animal paid no attention to either of them, leaping out of Regulus' arms and jumping onto a low, metal bedstead under the curtained window.

The room was thick with layer and layers of dust. Regulus wrinkled up his nose, and after he'd carefully re-locked the door behind them, he went around the room, poking things with the tip of his ebony wand and vanishing the dirt.

"It's nice to see a man tidy up," Hermione muttered, thinking of Ron and Harry and still feeling unhappy and somehow diminished by the lack of a wand. Regulus smirked and eventually, he flopped down next to her on the bed, and pointed his wand at the small fireplace in the wall.

"_Incendio!__"_

The flames sprang up, reassuring Hermione, who was just beginning to realize how close they had both been earlier, to not making it through the forest at all.

"This is nice, isn't it?" Regulus said sarcastically, stretching out. "Cosy. Don't you think?"

"What did those things do to you?" she asked him. "Why couldn't you walk?"

Regulus sighed. "They sap your strength. Your magical strength, that is. But I'm all right now. The tisane…"

"Well, she must know those things, then, to know a cure like that." Hermione said. " So she should be all right. Shouldn't she?"

"Of course." Regulus didn't sound really interested.

"I was really afraid for you." Hermione found the words were out whether she wanted to say them or not. He smiled.

"_I _was really afraid for me."

Hermione stood up, and walked around the room, running her finger over the now dust-free surfaces and staring at the fire for a moment, remembering something he;d said to her in the forest.

"Regulus," she said eventually.

"Yes?"

"You told me, in the forest, you told me something."

"What?" he raised an eyebrow expectantly.

"You said it wasn't me the Malevolents were after," She heard Regulus draw in breath. "What did you mean?"

There was a long silence. Regulus looked at the bare floorboards of the room, toying with the satin edge of the faded grey blanket on the bed, and eventually he answered.

"Nothing. I just wanted you to go, understand?"

"So why are you so tense all of a sudden? It's the same as when you wouldn't even tell me your name. I don't understand you. You kiss me, you save me, but you don't even trust me."

He swung his feet on to the floor and sat on the edge of the bed with his head in his hands, and when he did speak, it was with the air of a man about to be sentenced to hang.

"I have a confession to make," he muttered.

-

Hermione stood stock still, afraid of what she might be about to hear. The fire was too hot on the back of her dress, and she was being jabbed in the elbow by an ugly stone bowl on a stand to her left, but she didn't move.

"Go on." she said at last, as the silence stretched out between them. "After all," she said, pulling back the grubby curtain and looking out into the pitch dark. "I'm a captive audience, aren't I?"

Regulus smiled thinly, and then he began to spaek, very quietly.

"I wouldn't tell you my name at first," he said, "Because I thought you might know….what I did."

"What do you….." Hermione began, fearful, but Regulus held up a hand, and gave her a pleading look.

"You asked, so let me tell. Tell what I never told anyone before. I want to tell you, because I do trust you, no matter what you might believe, and I want you to understand."

He drew in a deep breath.

"I thought you might have heard my name before. And you had, but when you didn't say anything other than 'Sirius' brother' then I knew that nobody else had found out what I found out. And when we first met, I had no idea whose side you were on."

Hermione was indignant.

"I told you I was a Gryffindor the night you pulled me out of the swamp!"

"Not enough, Hermione." Regulus answered. "Peter Pettigrew was in Gryffindor as well, and he was passing information to Voldemort for ages. Before I knew."

"But you did know…and you never told your brother?" Hermione was incredulous. "You _knew__…__"_

"Yes, I knew. And I did try to tell Sirius, yes."

"You tried? Didn't you ever think of going to him for help? Joining the Order, if you were so afraid of leaving Voldemort?"

"You're painting Sirius in a far too heroic light, Hermione." Regulus said, with a sad smile. "As a matter of fact, though, you are right."

"Right? " Hermione asked. "Right about what?"

"Meaning that you were right about me going to ask for help."

"So why didn't you?"

"I did."

"What do you mean, you did?"

"I asked to join the Order of the Phoenix."

There was a long silence. Hermione stared at Regulus, trying to work out whether or not this could be true. Sirius had never said anything about it.

"I don't believe you," she said at last.

There was another pause as Regulus'eyes left her to drift onto the stone bowl by her elbow. A strange look spread slowly across his face.

"Then I'll show you." he said, quietly, pointing one long finger at the ancient bowl. "That's a pensieve."

-

A moment later and Hermione found herself standing on a dark and unfamiliar street. She heard a small noise, and Regulus landed next to her, his hand going immediately to his hair. Hermione laughed, and it rung loudly around the street, but she was abruptly silenced as she caught sight of a figure coming up the cobbled road.

It was a man, a tall man but his body was hunched over as if he was in great pain. He staggered up the road towards them, and Hermione backed away turning instinctively as if to hide. Regulus slid his hand into hers

"It's all right," he whispered close to her ear. "It's only a memory, remember?"

Hermione watched as the man staggered past them. His hood was over his face, obscuring his features as he dragged himself to the foot of a small stairwell hidden around the side of a dark building that, on closer inspection, proved to be a Chinese takeaway. A black motorcycle was parked in the alleyway.

"Ohhhhh…" Hermione gasped, recognising the motorbike at once, and almost at the same moment, the hunched figure reached the top of the stairs and raised an open hand with what seemed to be a great effort, and banged on the plywood door.

"Siri…" it croaked weakly. "Sirius!"

Hermione turned to Regulus, but his eyes were fixed on the black figure, who was calling again, banging again on the door. Hermione watched a few loose chips of burgundy paint flutter to the ground, and then , abruptly, the door flew open.

A much younger Sirius, maybe about twenty or so, stood in the doorway wearing no shirt and a pair of black army-style trousers. His hair was long and his feet were bare and Hermione was startled to see that he and Regulus really did look very much alike at that age. Sirius had his wand pointing at the caller, looking at him with narrowed eyes, until suddenly, to Hermione's horror, the black cloaked figure staggered and collapsed.

Hermione instinctively made to run forward, but Regulus caught her arm, and held her firmly back. She watched as Sirius-the-twenty-year-old darted forward and wrenched off the hood.

"Regulus!"

Hermione looked around at the Regulus holding her hand and he simply nodded by way of a response. The Regulus in the memory, who looked exactly the same age as the one she knew, was deathly pale and had his mouth slightly open, gasping for air, but Sirius looked far from happy to see him.

"What the hell are you doing here?" he spat, standing up and pulling his brother to his unsteady feet. "Brought some of your Death Eater mates to do me in? That your next job is it, Reggie, you pathetic little bastard?"

Hermione felt the Regulus standing next to her flinch slightly, and rub his face with his sleeve in a characteristic gesture. Oddly, the Regulus in the memory did the self-same thing..

"Sirius…." said memory Regulus once again sinking back to his knees and slurring his words, though he didn't seem as if he was drunk. "You gotta help. Help me."

Sirius laughed disdainfully. "Why in Merlin's name would I want to help you, Regulus? I thought you made your choice. We went our separate ways long ago when you sided with that mad bitch."

Hermione wasn't quite sure if he'd meant Bellatrix or crazy old Mrs Black. Both would be equally true, she thought.

"I never meant to…..I didn't…just please………listen……you've got to…Sirius…."

"I haven't _got_ to do anything, remember. Now pick your filthy Death Eater robes up off the floor and get away from my flat before they come looking for you." Sirius prodded Regulus hard with the toe of his boot, and the Regulus in the memory groaned, and clutched his stomach again.

"Sirius!" he sounded like he was making one final effort.

Sirius, who was going back inside the flat, turned back and hauled his brother to his feet for the second time. He half pushed, half dragged him down the narrow metal staircase and once at the bottom, he pushed him roughly away.

"Get lost. Now. And don't ever think of darkening my doorstep again. Death Eater."

He looked like he was about to spit at his brother for a moment, but then abruptly turned on his heel and started back up the stairs, slamming the door behind him.

Hermione realised that she had tears in her eyes. The Regulus Black beside her simply stared impassively at the proceedings as his earlier self picked himself up and began to stagger back down the cobbled street. The two of them followed wordlessly, but neither they nor he had got very far when there were tell-tale popping noises signalling the arrival of others.

The black robed figures in their hoods, obviously Death Eaters, surrounded the earlier Regulus, and a harsh female voice that Hermione was positive belonged to Bellatrix Lestrange, spoke.

"Regulus Arcturus Black," she rasped. "We arrest you in the name of our Lord for treachery and abandonment…."

Hermione watched as they seized his arms. He was obviously too weak to put up any resistance, though what had weakened him, it wasn't clear. They disapparated, leaving an empty street, and she felt a tug on her arm, and then they were standing on the sickly pink rug back in Cassandra's sister's cottage.

But Hermione's mind was whirling suddenly. It wasn't the seeing Sirius as a young man, or watching Regulus arrested by Death Eaters, ostensibly sentencing him to be murdered. It was the name Bellatrix had spoken aloud.

Regulus Arcturus Black.

She stepped back from the pensieve, and wildly, on a sudden whim, she rifled throught he pockets of her dress in search of the handkerchief he had given her when they had stood by the stream. She'd not even looked at the letters embroidered in the corner in green, but now, Regulus watching her looking nonplussed at the sudden frantic movement. Hermione found the scrap of fabric and tore it from her pocket, flattening it to see the initials on the corner. The initials that, sure enough, spelled out RAB.

"You….." she breathed in utter shock. "It was you…you don't like water……the cave…it was you. RAB…all along. That's how you knew. _You_ stole the locket. You're RAB."

Regulus might have pre-empted her words, because he had drawn his cloak close about himself and stepped back with a narrow, calculating look on his face and looking more like an ex-Death Eater than he ever had before. They stared at each other for a long, long moment, until he looked like he was going to say something. But before either of them had the chance, they heard the screaming.

Regulus drew the wand quicker than he'd drawn the sword on the banks of the lake.

"Stay here," he said curtly.

"No way."

"Then stay with me, and don't you dare let go. _Expecto patronum!__"_

The silvery lion once again burst forth from the wand of the ex-Slytherin beside her, and they stepped out together into the treacherous night.

-

Blood pounding in her ears, Hermione clutched Regulus' hand as they ran through the dark, following the unearthly , twisted screams coming from the direction of the forest.

Regulus was white and scared, and she couldn't seem to catch her breath, the sense of foreboding now almost suffocating, almost tangible. Every fibre in her being wanted to turn and run like the wind, run back to the relative safety of the cottage, but her mind and her morals drove her on. She wondered what Harry and Ron would have done if they were her, but they weren't her, and they weren't here, and all she had now was herself…and Regulus.

-

The body, or at least, that was what it appeared to be from a distance, was slumped against the trunk of a tall pine just inside the black forest.

The two of them approached hesitantly, and it was then they caught sight of the now -familiar nightmare black shapes.

But this time, they were not attacking. They retreated, like dissolving vapour, through the trees and away, at the sight of the Patronus, glowing silver and magnificent as ever by Regulus' side, sweeping off into the misty depths of the forest, making a ghastly sucking, rattling noise that almost resembled laughter, mocking and awful.

"They're afraid, Regulus." Hermione said softly.

"They've had their meal." he replied tersely, his face stricken and tense as he approached the crumpled figure on the ground.

It wasn't until Hermione caught sight of the turquoise cloak, torn and hanging from a nearby branch that they both knew for sure.

Cassandra lay, broken and white, spindly legs twisted at an unnatural angle

"I told her….I said not to.." Hermione whispered through tears, clenching her fists. "She was so _stupid_…if only she hadn't…"

"It's no good, Hermione." Regulus said, quietly. "It's not your fault."

He bent over the body. Cassandra's eyes were open, but instead of the protuberant orbs that she had gazed at them with earlier, now there were empty sockets, gaping black maws in a hollow face.

The Patronus circled menacingly, warding off any potential danger, and it was by it's slivery light that Hermione first saw the glint of gold as Regulus prised apart Cassandra's stiff cold fingers.

"Oh, god." she gasped, her breathing suddenly shallow, as Regulus looked round at her.

"That's Slytherin's locket. And it's _here_."

Reglus was silent, and turned back to the locket, which had cracked open along it's golden hinge.

"It's open at last," he breathed reverently. "She stole it, the crazy woman stole it when she gave me the tisane. No wonder……"

He swore violently, kicking the earth up with the toe of his boot.

"Come," he said, suddenly sharp. "We're getting away from this place. If it was dangerous before…let's say it just got a damn site worse."

-

Hermione, too stunned to speak, let him lead her back to the cottage. She walked slowly over to the hard wooden chair by the fireplace, and sat down very carefully and deliberately.

Regulus leaned with his back to the door, as if to prevent her from running out , away into the treacherous night, or maybe to protect her from it.

There was a long silence, and eventually Hermione could no longer stand it. She put her face in her hands.

"You've got Slytherin's locket," she said again, her voice muffled through her fingers. "How is it that you have one of Voldemort's Horcruxes, Regulus? How is it you never told me, and how the hell did _she_ get hold of it?"

She felt her voice rise, becoming shrill, and in a the next moment, before he could answer, she walked across the room to him, and held out her hand.

"Give me the locket." she said.

Regulus paused, and for a moment, Hermione thought he was going to refuse, but thenhe slid his hand into his pocket, and brought out the golden object, the object she, Harry and Ron had devoted so much time and care to searching for in order to defeat Voldemort. And now here it was.

"It's dead," he said, closing her fingers over it. "The memory I showed you is the night I took it. I went to my brother, thought I could tell him, show him, thought he'd believe me. I was mistaken, though, not that I blame him. I probably would have done the same to him, had the situation been reversed."

"I've spent my life since I left school searching for these._Risking _my life, to search for these." Hermione said, her legs unsteady. "He had _seven_, Regulus. Did you know that when you left that note? Seven, not one. So many people _died_-" she stopped, suddenly realising again that she was one of them.

Her legs gave way then. Regulus put his arms out quickly to steady her and break her fall, and he held onto her as he laid her down on the over-stuffed bed, her head resting on his lap. He stroked her hair gently, running his fingers over it like he had never felt it before, or done something so intimate.

"Was it dead when you took it?" Hermione asked after a moment.

Regulus sighed.

"No. Cassandra stole it from me, just goes to show that she must have had some powers of perception after all, to know I had it in the first place, but in any case, it's a piece of soul, or it _was_. A powerful piece of soul, seeing that it belonged to one of the most powerful dark wizards in history. She took it from me, but she made a mistake, she knew it was a powerful magical object, but she didn't know _why_. The Malevolents were after me in the forest, not you, so I told you to run. I didn't want another person to pay the price for my actions. Such an exceptional piece of soul would be a banquet for those things. And you saw them…but it's open now, and I could never open it before. It's dead. The soul has gone, and the Horcrux is destroyed."

"Whoever thought those things could actually do anything good?" Hermione muttered."You should have told me."

"I was going to. I really was. I just…"

He looked away, suddenly colouring, and pushed back his hair, all awkward grace as always.

"Just what?"

"We met in this damned place, Hermione, and yet despite everything, you've made me understand that I should never have tried to face things on my own. If I'd known that before, things might have been different. It's too late now, for me, but it's not for you. My feelings for you now….." he stopped short. "Look, I didn't _want_ to tell you, because I knew you'd try to do it yourself. I wanted to find another way. I'm sorry, I just didn't want to see you hurt."

Hermione looked at him for a long moment, remembering that kiss in the forest, how she'd felt when she thought she was never going to see him again, and she felt a sudden surge of affection for the man next to her. She sat up, and slid her arms around his neck.

He looked a little nervous, and she was sure he felt him trembling ever so slightly when they kissed, but he returned her embrace until she broke it, and on a sudden impulse, she asked:

"How did you actually die?"

Regulus drew back a little, pulling his knees up to his chest.

"He got my cousin to come for me. Bella, as you saw.. He knew that would hurt me the most….we used to…" He paused, and drew breath. " _I_ used to love her like a sister…or perhaps, as she no doubt told the bastard, a little more than a sister. It was because of her that I joined up in the first place. Sirius thought it was our mother that wanted it, and she did, at first, but it was because of Bella that I actually went ahead. I wanted to impress her.; Sirius was always the one with the girls around him, even at school. I never really knew what to say, so I just shut my mouth. That's how it started, anyway. Bella asked me out with her one evening, and I thought……..well, never mind what I thought. But she took me to meet him. And it went from there."

"What happened after they arrested you?" Hermione asked.

He closed his eyes briefly, almost as if he was trying to remember the exact order of events.

"She must have known I wanted to leave by then, how I don't know, but she did, she always knew. We went to Headquarters, his old place in the country, his father's you know. He took me for a walk in the old orchard. And that's when he did it."

"The Avada Kedavra?"

Regulus laughed loudly and bitterly, sounding more like Sirius than ever, shut up in Grimmauld Place and going crazy.

"That would have been a blessing." he said, quietly. "It would have been quick."

His fingers were at his throat, slowly unwinding the black scarf he always wore. Then he reached down and folded up the hem of his trousers, lifting his head up as he did so.

Hermione gasped. There, across his neck, were angry red marks, and on his ankles, there was a long line of jagged scarring around each.

"He told me that the Avada was too good for me, that I was filth and a blood traitor." he said, matter of factly. "At first, I thought he might have guessed what else I'd done, but he never asked which is a blessing, or I might have told him, eventually. About the locket. But obviously, he never found out."

"But what did he _do_?"

"First, he cut off my right foot, then my left. He stood in front of me, asked how I was going to run away from him now. I went for my wand, but it was no use. He just laughed and didn't even bother to disarm me. He hung me instead, from one of the trees in his fathers old orchard, and left me to die that way. He told me I could be a deterrent, then I could at least be useful to him that way. Bella came out and looked at me, just before he broke my neck. She laughed at me, and told me I was weak, and that she never really cared a thing for me. And that's when I died. I woke up here, and ever since then I've been wandering around this place. I can't go back…and I can't go on."

Hermione realised tears were falling down her face. She reached out to touch the scars on his ankles, and though he flinched, just a little,he didn't pull away. She took him in both arms, crying and crying into his hair, until he pulled her towards him, kissed first her wet cheeks, and then her mouth, until Hermione found that it was possible to weep and kiss at the same time.

It was as if years of holding on to grief and rage and anger had come undone in Regulus as she held him, pulling him down onto the bed with her, fingers fumbling at the buttons on his bloodstained shirt.

They kissed together on the bed, and she felt him slide his own hands underneath her dress to stroke her legs. She lifted the dress over her head at last, and sank down onto him, bare skin on bare skin. Regulus groaned and shuddered.

"Oh," he muttered, sighing deeply with his eyes shut tight.

"Can we…can you…..can you actually….if we're here..nothing horrible is going to happen…I mean, if we do……the world won't suddenly implode, will it?" Hermione whispered as they moved closer.

His eyes still closed, he smiled.

"I don't think it will, no. But who cares if it does."

-

Hermione marvelled at how silent the world could be at night in this place where everything was dead, apart from the souls of the creatures that wandered here. She wondered whether, if she ever saw her friends, her parents, her old life again, whether she would remember all this, or if she'll have changed, irrevocably, in a way only she could see, or if it will be all remembered as one might remember a dream gone mad.. She tilted her head to look up to where Regulus was lying, his arms around her, wanting to talk to him, allay her fears, but he was silent, and when she saw his face, she knew why.

Long eyelashes lay closed in sleep on pale cheeks. Regulus Black for once looked completely at peace, without a care in this world, or any other, the locket glinting gold in his hand and casting glittering pools on the crumbling, whitewashed walls in the light of the guttering candle.

* * *

Quoted: Pirates Of The Caribbean, AWE [novel 

Comments welcome.


	11. Ten : A Call To War

**Disclaimer**:Not mine, no money made. Thanks.

**Author's Note:** So...we reach the end at last! This is the final chapter of Hermione's adventures with the youngest Black. May we hope at the end of this week (book 7!!) he gets some leg-room! All that remains now is to say great thanks to _everyone_ who has followed this, I was and still am quite surprised at how many like-minded folk there were!

I hope you all enjoy the last part. I'd love to know what everyone thinks, too, as always.

Thanks for reading!

**Summary:** "If we were alive today, we would never have met."

When the Order Of The Phoenix learn of Voldemort's latest plan to use the Veil to experiment with immortality, they embark on a mission to destroy it once and for all. Hermione Granger is nineteen, and in charge of finding the spell that will succeed in this task. But when the mission goes wrong and Hermione is pulled in, who can she possibly turn to for help now she's….well..dead?

**Ten**

**A Call To War **

_"It's no use going back to yesterday._

_I was a different person then..."_

_-_

When the daylight came, it filtered through the threadbare cotton curtains and leaving multicoloured shapes on the walls. It highlighted the cracks and stains and cobwebs, and Hermione awoke slowly, feeling more warm and comfortable that she had in a very long time, even before she came to this place. Usually, waking up meant worry descending upon her again after only too few hours of respite, that is , if the old fears of Voldemort and his slow takeover of the Wizarding world had not invaded her dreams, the dreams where mysterious objects touched with deadly curses were always just out of reach…

But now, soft fingertips stroked lightly along the back of her neck, pushing thick messy curls aside. A lock of smooth, straight black hair that was not her own fell over her shoulder, tickling her collarbones, and soft, dry lips kissed her shoulder.

"Morning," Regulus murmured, kissing her again and making her insides tremble, and she didn't need to look at him to know he was smiling.

She lay there for a few moments, just enjoying the feeling of the warm body pressed up against her, the fresh scent of his long hair and it's silky feel over her skin, and remembering the night before.

Last night she had been terrified of the consequences of such intimacy, but even when he'd asked her, panting and breathless, if she wanted to stop, she couldn't bear him to, needing the feel of his skin against her, hands doing the most wonderful things, things that she had never felt before, and all this somehow soothing the aching emptiness inside. Now, though, she wondered how she ever could have doubted it.

She reached her hand back, running it through those dark silken locks that had been wild and messy and damp with sweat the night before, something ,for once,that their owner had not immediately attemped to correct. Regulus made a small, appreciative noise that reminded Hermione of a purring cat, but after a moment, he kissed her one last time and moved away.

She heard him get out of bed and begin to dress. When she sat up, he had just begun to button up his shirt. Her own clothes were hung neatly over the back of the stiff wooden chair by the fireplace They had been cleaned as well by the looks of it; he must have done it with the wand, she thought, probably lying there awake before she had opened her eyes.

"You slept," she said, with a little surprise, remembering his face blank in slumber and turning to face him.

"As did you," he returned with a slight smile.

"I was so tired."

"Me too. Felt like I was alive."

He said the words quietly with his back to her, and laughed briefly, but Hermione did not miss the meaning in them. He stayed silent as she dressed herself, picking up his boots and beginning to lace them, and when he had finished, he went around the room placing everything back where it had been when they arrived. They left the key in the porch of Cassandra's empty cottage. It seemed the only thing to do.

-

The morning was crisp, bright and beautiful, and they walked over smooth, low green grass, sloping uphill as far as the horizon stretched beyond the Seer woman's now-empty dwelling place. The grass became sandy as they neared the height of the slope, a strange, low sound coming on the clear air, and then suddenly, at the very top, they could see the other side.

A great sand dune sloped downwards, and the low roar was that of the sea, still as glass but for the small waves that broke it's surface again and again. No ships were there to see on the straight and clear skyline, and the two of them stood and stared for what seemed like forever, Regulus' hand a slight, but reassuring, pressure on Hermione's shoulder, the gentle breeze tugging the hair around their faces.

"We're close, aren't we?" she whispered, at last.

"I think so, yes." he replied steadily.

The vast expanse of sand sloped gently down to the beach. They tried to walk normally, but ended up having to almost run to keep up with the gradient of the land underneath their feet. After she'd fallen over for the fifth time, Hermione started to laugh, and they both began to run.

"Race you to the bottom!" Regulus called, and they did, although his legs were so much longer he had the clear advantage and she ended up at the bottom of the dune in a tangled heap, laughing uncontrollably as he pulled her back to her feet.

They surveyed the landscape. It curved around, almost a perfect crescent of which they were at one end.

"She never told us the way," Hermione observed, looking across at the other end of the beach. The rock face was high, there, and looked treacherous, but the top was so cloaked in mist, shimmering and indistinct, that it was impossible to tell from here what lay beyond it.

"We'll just have to find it ourselves, then." Regulus said firmly. "I didn't see any other way than the way we came, so we must be on the right track. But we should hurry, we might not have all the time in the world."

"What do you mean?" Hermione asked, suddenly nervous.

"The Keeper told you to make haste," he said. "And I think you should, too."

He glanced at her very quickly, and then looked away, and suddenly, she realised that the unbearable moment, the moment she would have to leave him here alone, might be very close at hand.

-

Just as a hard day drags along and seems to pass so much slower than one might wish for it to, so too Hermione found that as the other side of the beach drew ever closer, the sick feeling in her stomach intensified, the cold hand that seemed to have hold of her heart, began to tighten it's grasp. Regulus was quiet, holding her close all the while, his pale eyes sometimes drifting off over, beyond the blue-grey horizon as if he could see something over it that she couldn't, his face set as if deep in thought.

The warm water splashed around their ankles as they went, and Hermione thought, that in another time or place this would have been the perfect day for lovers, the sun warm on their skin, the sea air clean and the whole world at peace with itself. Impulsively, she turned around, and put her arms around Regulus' waist, standing on her toes to pull him down into a kiss.

He didn't put up any resistance, and returned her embrace generously, and when they broke away, they stood looking out at the sea for a long moment.

"Beautiful, isn't it?" she said, at last, for want of something say more than anything.

Regulus nodded in silence, but she noticed with a jolt inside that he had not been looking at the view, and she had to swallow hard to keep the tears down inside, where they belonged.

-

It was cold by the time they reached the steep rocky wall at the other end of the beach. The temperature must have dropped by degrees, but although Hermione shivered, Regulus didn't seem to notice until the air seemed to mist and become harder to see through, like the early morning mists Hermione recalled when she, Harry and Ron had camped on various journeys.

But the light was as strong as ever. If anything, it was becoming much brighter, concentrated around the highest point of the rocks just above them, an intense glow of light without heat. Hermione looked across at Regulus, who merely nodded briefly, and they began to climb.

Hermione's hands were sore with the effort of gripping the rocks by the time they both reached a ledge along which ran a tiny stony path, twisting around and behind the rock face. Regulus, as always never betraying any sign of effort with the climb, swung himself over the edge and stood on the path, helping Hermione the last of the way. She took only a few moments to compose herself, aware of the drop in air pressure up this high, and trying not to look down at the drop below lest she lose her balance.

There was definitely something in the air, she knew, almost like a sound one cannot quite hear, but that one is aware of all the time. A movement of some sort, or vibrations, perhaps, in the atmosphere. She hesitated as Regulus began along the track, wondering if he could feel it too, but before she could ask, he said without turning

"You'll be home soon, Hermione."

-

If Hermione had ever believed in the tales of the gates of Heaven, all the pictures in latter day books with plump-cheeked cherubs and angels that she had seen and heard of at her Muggle primary school, the sight that met her eyes as at last they turned a corner both halted where they stood, was not one that she had ever seen or could ever, she thought, have imagined.

The gates that reared up in front of them were more beautiful and ornate than anything Hermione had ever seen, the wrought metal tens of feet high. They were indeed golden, but a pale, shimmering gold that shifted and changed as the two of them stood in awe, speechless for a second suspended in time as they stood on the long stretch of smooth grass leading the way towards this passageway of the dead. Here, the mists were thick and shrouded the whole place, stretching as far beyond the gates as the eye could see, into bright white nothingness. The light, that penetrating impossible cold light that had cast it's glow all the way up into the sky from here, it's source; seemed to be emanating from somewhere behind the gates.

Hermione, suddenly afraid, reached for Regulus' hand, and looked up at him.

"This is it, isn't it?" she asked, quietly. "This is the Soul Crossing."

He nodded, and took a step towards the gates.

"Come on. It's time."

They approached the tall gates slowly and cautiously, mist now swirling around their feet, and as they did so, Hermione saw that the tall gate was not the only one.

A much, much smaller gate lay set into the wall next to the enormous shimmering double ones. This gate was only a single door, and made of sparkling silver, the exact same hue of the key the Keeper had given Regulus. As if in answer to an unspoken question, he looked up at her, his face pale, his hand delving into his pocket and holding up between thumb and forefinger the precious silver key and holding it out to her, his other hand gesturing towards the gate.

-

Hermione met his eyes unflinching, a silence between them as tangible as the ever-changing mists.

"Come with me," she said, suddenly. "Please."

Regulus said nothing, just smiled and pulled her into a firm embrace that seemed to last an eternity. Hermione closed her eyes and wept at last, into his sleeve, until he broke away and never taking his eyes from hers, said gently,

"We can't both go back, Hermione." he held up the key that she still hadn't taken from him. "Just one soul, remember, and in any case, we're from different times. Imagine what it would be like if we returned and I survived…..it wouldn't be able to happen, because you wouldn't be who you are. Events conspire, and all that, I think the phrase is. You would never have been to Grimmauld Place, because it would have been mine, and I would still have been a Muggle-hating Pureblood fanatic. But in any case," he said, "If I went back, I'd go back there, in that orchard, on that night, the night that somewhere in the world, you were being born. I don't think it's an accident that we met here. We both had a purpose. D'you believe in fate? It's another sort of soul crossing, really, isn't it? Like us. I left the world, and you arrived. And now I'm going to send you home."

He stepped towards the gate and put the key in the lock.

"What will you do?" Hermione asked him.

He stood up very straight, and held out his hands, palms up, and Hermione noticed that somehow, he looked a little less solid, the dark shadows under his eyes diminished to the point of being barely there.

"I think I can go on now." he said. "Find my way back to the Keeper, get the key to the other gate."

"Alone? Through that forest, and all that way, on your own?"

He nodded. "Got enough happy memories to keep me safe," he grinned. " And I'll find my way back. Sirius and I will have some catching up to do."

"You won't tell Sirius…about us, will you?" Hermione asked, thinking how crazy the question sounded.

Regulus pulled a face of mock horror.

"What, and listen to him talk about all the girls he's had and have to keep quiet about the only one I ever did? Unspeakable!"

Hermione let his words filter through her mind.

"I was the only one?" she asked in surprise, not being able to help herself.

"I'm gratified you couldn't tell," he answered, raising an eyebrow and giving her a wry smile. "My…..occupation in the last months of my life didn't lend itself well to romance. And being Sirius Black's brother never really helped, to be honest."

Impulsively, she hugged him.

"You were lovely," she whispered. "And I would stay here with you forever, if only I could."

"I'd like that," he said, quietly. "But you need to carry on."

"I know. Harry and Ron won't attack Voldemort without finding the locket. And Voldemort won't stop until someone stops him by force."

"Ah……Just Ron. He'll like to see you home, I think.".

Hermione sighed faintly.

"Yes. Yes, I expect he will."

"You know, I didn't like him when I first saw him. But perhaps, if he looks after you, I'll change my mind." Regulus said, thoughtfully, and Hermione got the distinct impression he was only half-joking.

"And why would you do that?" she asked, raising her own eyebrow at him.

Regulus smiled and looked away.

"Because I reckon we've got something in common, he and I."

There was a very long pause. Then Regulus turned back to the gate. The silver key turned easily, and the gate swung open. Regulus held it and Hermione walked slowly towards the entrance, staring out at what seemd to be a sheer wall of swirling cloud.

"It's just a sheer drop," she said nervously.

Regulus nodded.

"Only one way down again then, I daresay." he said.

She turned back momentarily, and saw that he was holding something out to her.

"Nail the bastard, won't you," he said, with a short humourless laugh, his voice sounding suddenly as if he had a bad cold.

Hermione felt hot tears begin at the corners of her eyes as she realised that this really was goodbye. She looked down at his hand and saw that what he was holding out was the locket, ugly, cracked…and empty. She took it from him silently.

"Tell him it's a gift from the _Noble House of Black_."

"I will," she whispered, putting her arms around him one last time. Regulus smiled, and glanced a little wistfully at the crossing.

"Goodbye, Hermione."

She looked up at him at last, eyes shining with tears.

"Goodbye."

And then, determined as ever, she strode through the gate, over to the edge where the fathomless mists fell down and down in a bottomless fall that seemed to have no end. The last thing she saw as she turned and looked back at this strange world, was the tall figure of Regulus Black on the other side of the gate. He relocked it carefully, gave one wave, and turned, hair blowing in the cold breeze and cloak streaming out behind him, back down the treacherous path they had once travelled together.

And then she let herself fall over and backwards, though the cold and the mists, and the picture was gone.

-

The feeling was like a sharp blow to the solar plexus, Hermione choked taking an almighty breath of cold air amidst the sound of crashing and the crumbing of bricks, and felt a hand on her shoulder, pulling her unsteadily to her feet.

"Shit!_ Shit_!" came a familiar voice, terrified.

"We nearly lost her there."said another.

The voices were all around, shouting and swearing and calling urgently amidst all the other sounds ringing in her ears

The spell had worked. The veil was coming down. Strong hands grabbed hers and pulled her up, and she found her feet running between those hands, arms around her back, half dragging, half leading. The ceiling seemed to be falling in, now, and she breathed in dust, choked, but carried on running, the pounding of other peoples feet thrumming in her ears. Something sharp hit her, hard, above her lip. It took a moment to feel the hot blood dribbling into her mouth, but she kept on running because Regulus had hold of her hand with his and his hand was always so impossibly warm, and in any case, the Malevolents might be coming. Regulus did not have red hair though…….

At last they reached the lifts and the street outside. Hermione stood still, gasping great lungfuls of the fresh evening air of the same day she'd left. Suddenly, she felt her throat prickle and her stomach begin to heave. Without warning, she leaned over into the gutter, and vomited neatly onto the pavement.

-

Somewhere, in some place that sounded alternately very distant, and then very close to her, Hermione could hear voices. She was vaguely aware of giving her body the repeated command to open it's eyes, but somehow, he brain was not responding to the call. The voices came and went, there were quiet times, and times when she thought it might be dark and times of light, but the voices echoed on, and she was powerless to respond to them.

"Thank god…thank god…." That might have been her mother.

"Hermione? Can you hear us? Can you hear us, Hermione?" Harry.

"She should have woken up by now…" That was Ron, impatient as ever.

"Don't be silly, Ron. It's still early days." Mrs. Weasley, she thought.

"It's all my fault…" Harry again, and Hermione wanted to tell him to stop being stupid, but she couldn't.

It was dark when she finally did open her eyes. There was no trial, no effort, she simply woke up suddenly, as if waking from a particularly deep sleep.

The room was long and bare and very white, but it wasn't a hospital, and someone lay with their head bowed in sleep against the sheets by her elbow. Someone with too-long red hair, his pale hand on her arm.

Ron. Hermione reached out and touched his hair gently with her right hand, but her didn't stir. The other hand was sore and bruised and clenched, but she couldn't remember what had caused it.

Bringing it up to her eyes, she forced her fingers open. The ugly, gold locket dropped onto the white sheet, and she stared at it a moment, remembering, before scooping it up in a panic, and sliding unsteadily out of bed , shoving it into the bottom drawer of the nightstand.

It was Ron who found her collapsed on the linoleum, surprised that he hadn't noticed the sudden burst of activity. He called down to Harry, who ran thumping upstairs, and stood in the doorway with a huge grin.

"You're all right!" he said, and she actually managed a faint smile back, aware of the slight pressure of Ron's hand still on her arm.

"We……thought the veil killed you." Ron said, after a long pause. "You just sort of went all limp, and stopped breathing, and then a moment later, you woke up, just as we thought that was it." He wasn't looking at her as he said these words, but Hermione noticed that his voice was flatter, less flippant than it usually was, and she was grateful.

"I'll be fine," she managed, still feeling a little dizzy, and laid back on the pillows.

"I picked your wand up off the floor," Ron was saying. "After the Death Eaters ran for it. You dropped it. I actually think I might have immobilized one of them , too, on the way out…..but I was too busy running after you to look back. You just ran for it, Hermione. I never saw you run so fast…"

"Where are we, anyway?" Hermione asked. "Why didn't they take me to St. Mungo's?"

Harry answered. "Well, at first we weren't sure what was wrong. But then one of the Healers in the Order had a look at you and said that it was a shock to the brain and that you needed to rest, that's all. We couldn't risk the hospital, either, you know that if the Death Eaters want somebody dead, then a hospital isn't going to stop them."

"So where are we, then?" she repeated , a little impatiently.

"Oh." said Ron, looking a little puzzled. "We're in Grimmauld Place, still. But we got this room all cleaned up, just for you. There's a great view as well, if you can get up, but they hit your ankle as well, with some kind of curse. We did manage to lift it, but it might still hurt a bit. That bloody bastard Dolohov still isn't dead…he's got it coming though…….the next time I….."

As Ron and Harry launched into another blow-by-blow post-mortem of the events of the night of September 30th, Hermione dozed and just let their words wash over her, taking in what she could and ignoring the rest, glad simply to just be able to sit there and hear the reassuring murmur of familiar, friendly voices.

Over the next week or so, Hermione had a steady stream of visitors both concerned and asking after her health, and full of congratulations on her successful spell. It transpired that the mysterious veil has indeed been destroyed, one of the other members of the Order having managed to procure top secret Ministry photographs of the event.

Her head still felt heavy, though, and despite the newness and novelty of so many people suddenly so interested in her, she found that although she had originally thought that telling Harry and Ron about the locket would be the first thing she would do, if she ever returned to the world of the living, now she could not even open the drawer in which she had stashed the empty trinket that had once held a fragment of Voldemort's maimed soul.

-

It was Luna Lovegood, of all people, that she confided in, in the end. It was nearly Hallowe'en when she had finally managed to stand, and she took to looking out of the window, watching the birds and the squirrels gathering their autumn fill down in the gardens below, the leaves turning orange on the silver birches and the apples falling off of the Black's old trees and gently rotting on the once-well-tended lawn.

In another, past, time, a different Hermione would have laughed at the notion of herself and Luna being confidantes.It was in her usual place by the window that she was standing when the door creaked open a little one afternoon, just after four, and Luna poked her head around the door.

"Hi, Hermione," said the Irish girl, opening the door wider and coming into the room itself.

Hermione turned, not altogether pleased to see the younger woman. Luna carried a bulging purple string bag over one narrow wrist and the strap had left a red mark. In the other hand she had a tray of tea with some oranges on it, and as the door clicked shut, they rolled off the tray and on to the floor.

Luna seemed unperturbed and busied herself retrieving the fruit from under the bed while Hermione slid back under the covers, her legs aching again. Luna, brushing dust out of her untidy blonde hair, came out from under the bed triumphantly and deposited the now rather dusty oranges in Hermione's lap. She settled herself into the battered, brown armchair by the side of the bed.

"How are you?" she asked, in remarkably level tones, for her.

"Not bad," Hermione answered carefully. "I thought you were in America."

"Oh, I was." Luna answered, in surprise. "But I always come home for Hallowe'en. Harry asked me to stay. I think he's a little worried about you, actually."

"Why would he be worried _now_?" Hermione said. "Like I said, I'm fine."

"Yes," Luna agreed, looking at Hermione's pale face. "But I had to ask…..you know what they've been saying?"

Hermione narrowed her eyes at the younger woman.

"What have they been saying?" she asked, curiously.

"They said you died in the Ministry. They said you died, and your heart stopped, and then you woke up again."

"Well," Hermione tried to ignore the penetrating stare Luna was giving her. "I…..I…."

She never really knew why she couldn't answer, or why she found herself locking the door with her wand and rummaging in the bottom drawer of the nightstand until she found the heavy golden locket. She never really knew at all what drove her to tell Luna the story from start to finish, but Luna listened in silence, never taking her eyes off of Hermione as she spoke, and never interrupting, only occasionally looking down at the ugly ancient relic Hermione had thrust into her hands. But perhaps at the back of Hermione's mind was the fact that Luna, once upon an earlier time, had heard the voices beyond the veil, had seen the Thestrals and she _believed. _And Hermione needed someone to believe, right now.

When she had finished, she waited, not looking at the younger woman. There was a silence. All she could hear was the constant back and forth shift of Luna hefting the weight of the locket between her outstretched hands.

Unable to bear the silence, Hermione broke it.

"Do you believe me?" she demanded.

Luna looked up, grey eyes (the exact same grey as _his, _Hermione realised) looking at her like they were searching her face. It seemed to take her a long time to answer, but she did, at long last.

"Harry found some more portraits this morning," she said serenely.

"Why don't you come and see?"

At first, Hermione felt angry and impatient. Why, the girl hadn't listened to a word she'd said! Then, she realised.

"Oh," she whispered, and understood.

-

Leaning on the younger girls' arm, they negotiated the stairway up another floor to the attic without meeting anyone.

The room was dusty, and the door showed signs of having recently been forced open, fragments and chips of wood on the floor around it. _Ron_, she thought, with a wry grin.

When she pushed open the door, Luna fell back, leaning against the wall outside and fiddling absently with a lock of hair. Hermione didn't question her, she knew as well that if there was something to see, she wanted to see it alone. Luna seemed to understand.

The portrait took up most of the wall in the small, low-ceilinged room, the edges brown with age even though the colours of the oils were still bright. In places, the canvas looked as if it had been burned away from the tarnished frame, but the portrait itself remained almost perfect.

Leaning against an apple tree in what appeared to be the grounds of the house was a teenage boy in a long flowing cloak, his white cuffs visible like bandages on his wrists and his long black hair sleek and shiny, tied neatly with a handsome velvet ribbon and hung over one elegant shoulder.

He didn't look up at once but Hermione was strangely aware that he somehow knew that she was there.

"Regulus," she said aloud, at last, as if to try out the name in _this_ world as much as to get his attention, as to reassure herself he had been there… and at last, slowly, the boy raised his head and she found herself looking once more into those round grey eyes with the impossibly long lashes. He smiled.

"I wondered if you would find me, " he said, quietly. "I waited."

"Where are you now?" Hermione suddenly realised that tears were running down her cheeks and there was a strange pain somewhere, inside that she couldn't quite place, or maybe she was too afraid to.

She moved forward, both hands outstretched like a blind person, to touch the portrait. Canvas, nothing more, and Hermione felt the tears edge out in despair.

"Can I kiss you goodbye?" she wept, biting down on her hand as if to keep from breaking down completely.

Regulus looked at her sadly.

"No…..I'm just an image now. But before I go...I just wanted to know, know for sure...that you made it."

"Don't go!" Hermione whispered. "I want to come back, to be with you again"

"You can't. " he said gently. " I've……I've gone on………he'll be here to get me any moment…"

"Who will?" she asked

He glanced behind him as if expecting someone to arrive, and sure enough, as Hermione watched, there was a bright surge of light in the portrait, and a tall man with the very same long, black hair approached. Sirius was walking towards his brother, his hand going out and closing over Regulus' wrist, and pulling him into a firm embrace.

"Come on, little brother, " she was sure she heard him murmur. " It's about time."

And then the portrait went blank.

Luna was still leaning on the wall quite a while later when Hermione left the room. She looked at Hermione, a light of knowledge in her pale eyes, and Hermione nodded, and they both understood .

"I think it's time we told Harry about that locket," Luna said.

-

**Epilogue**

"_My footsteps will want to march to where you lie sleeping_

_But I shall go on living.__"_

Ron never knew where Hermione went every single year at the end of September, and something told him not to ask. She always returned to him, in any case, so what did it really matter?

Today was sunny and fine, though five years since Voldemort's fall and four since Ron and Hermione's wedding, she still walked with a slight limp, and the scar of the old injury could still be seen, faint above her lip. The Riddle House, Voldemort's father's old home, had been demolished, the sad contents of various barred cells and torture rooms buried or burned, including the bones that they found in the orchard.

Hermione paused in Diagon Alley, closing her ears to the hustle and bustle of the street, now busy again and almost back to normal, after the war. She paid the flower seller on the corner one silver sickle before turning down a grey cobbled side street that led to the Wizard cemetery.

Here, in the cemetery, it was cool and still and silent. Hermione stepped through the rows and rows of graves, some dating back to the first war, and many from the second, until she arrived at one particular spot, a stone of cool, pale marble, bearing one particular name.

Hermione laid the white roses on the grave of the teenage boy who had died the day she was born, and walked the long way home.

The End

* * *

Quoted: #1: Lewis Carroll 

#2: Pablo Neruda


End file.
